Backstab Read online

  The story began, “Etta Mae has endured much, including her first pregnancy at age 15 and the misery of living on welfare with nine children. But today she had another burden laid on her ample shoulders. Her son, Tyronne, 12, was gunned down, possibly by St. Louis police, during a raid on an alleged crack house….”

  Rita was not going to grieve about a dead crack dealer, even if he was twelve. She hated them all. Their desperate young customers had mugged her twice on her way home from her afternoons at the Peppermill. The second time, she held on to her purse so hard she broke her wrist when the kid yanked it out of her hands. Now her afternoons included the added cost of a cab. A tipsy retiree was a target.

  “And then they’re putting that trashy woman with her dead drug-dealing son on page one,” Rita snapped. “Doesn’t your paper do any stories about churchgoing black people? I worked with a lot of them at City Hall, and believe me, they held down two and three jobs to send their sons and daughters to college. They raised up fine doctors and lawyers and accountants. But not if you read the Gazette. All black people are drug dealers and suffering welfare mothers.”

  She was warming to her subject. I glanced at the clock: four thirty-five. I had to go soon. I had less than an hour and a half to finish my column.

  “Where’s the news in my newspaper?” raged Rita. “What’s going on in the Middle East? What’s Congress up to? What’s happening in Mexico after we signed that stupid trade agreement? Why can’t I find out what’s going on in the world?”

  Because the City Gazette paid half a million dollars to a group of consultants, who concluded readers wanted local news. If the paper had spent half a million dollars on news staff, they could have had outstanding local stories. But the CG didn’t want to hire more reporters. So they stuck to murders and kitten rescues, which were cheap and easy to do. They also played to some readers’ prejudices: White suburban kids saved kittens. Black city kids sold drugs.

  But I couldn’t tell Rita that. I didn’t have to. She answered her own question: “They’re too cheap to do real reporting,” she said. I was always amazed at how much readers figured out by themselves.

  “And they’ve missed the real story. It’s right there, right in front of them, buried in their own paper.”

  “Where?” I said. If there was a story going loose, I wanted it.

  “Check the ‘Police Notes.’ The second item under ‘City Murders.’ ”

  I hunted around for a daily paper, turned to page five-A, and read the single fine-print paragraph: “Police found the body of a prostitute in a Dumpster in the 700 block of Bedler St.”

  Hmmm, that address was right by the paper. Also right by the projects. It was a desolate area with empty weed-and-brick-studded lots and soon-to-be-razed buildings. The burned-out shells had the intense blackened look of insurance fires. A lot of bodies were found around Bedler Street.

  “An autopsy showed the person had been beaten and strangled and was undergoing a sex change,” the article said.

  “Wow!” I said, “That would put a strain on anybody.”

  “Don’t laugh,” huffed Rita. I could almost see her chin wobbling indignantly. “It says here the deceased was twenty-two, had bosoms, was taking female hormones, but still hadn’t had his whatchamacallit cut off.”

  That’s not quite how the paper phrased it, but Rita caught the spirit. The managing editor, Hadley Harris the Third, was a nineteenth-century prude in a twentieth-century job. He wore hand-tied bow ties, parted his thinning hair in the center, and wrote editorials about family values, Republican virtues, and the joys of raising his two daughters.

  What most readers didn’t know was, Mr. Family Values ran around on his wife. At first I dismissed the gossip about Hadley. Sure, I’d see him with a female staffer a few times, and then she’d be promoted, but I just thought he was getting to know her. He was. I didn’t know how well until I covered an undertakers’ convention at the Riverside Inn downtown. I was supposed to interview a “grief counselor” in a seventeenth-floor suite. As the elevator doors opened, I saw Hadley and a mousy-looking city desk reporter coming out of suite 1710. Hadley was tying his bow tie, so I knew it wasn’t a clip-on, and smooching Miss Mouse on her round little ear. I ducked back into the elevator, hit the down button and hoped they didn’t see me. Three weeks later Miss Mouse got the coveted job of consumer reporter. I wondered what she consumed to get that promotion.

  A true Victorian, Hadley felt what you said was more important than what you did. Hadley treated readers as if they were sheltered maidens, too delicate to withstand modern life. Nothing improper—i.e., interesting—was allowed to sully the City Gazette’s pages. With Hadley on one of his prude watches, I was surprised the sex-changing prostitute made the paper at all, even a paragraph in the “Police Notes.” Hadley was constantly lecturing me on good taste. Our latest run-in was when I mentioned in a column that a grocery store clerk found a used condom draped over a grapefruit. I thought this was a funny vignette about city life. Hadley Harris read it on a page proof and almost needed smelling salts to revive.

  “Not in my newspaper,” he screamed. “Get it out. Out. Out.” You’d have thought a rat had run over his desk. I could see his scalp turning pink through the thinning hair. That was a bad sign.

  “Hadley, don’t cut the condom,” I said. “It will be talked about.”

  “That’s not the kind of discussion I want my paper to create,” he said. “A Hadley Harris paper has principles. We don’t pander to interest in smut.”

  I wondered if Hadley used condoms for his assignations. I wondered if I could still make my Visa payment if I told the skirt-chasing hypocrite to stuff it. Sigh. Why did I argue? It was useless. There was no way I could explain to Rita we were lucky to see one paragraph on the dead prostitute in Hadley’s paper. There was no way to explain Hadley.

  “There’s a story there. Aren’t you curious?” said Rita.

  “The victim is a prostitute. Lots of them get killed.”

  “I still think it’s a story,” grumped Rita. “I bet a customer found out she was a he and killed her. Remember BJ Betty?”

  Rita couldn’t bring herself to say Blow Job Betty, as BJ was really called, not even after two beers.

  “Of course I remember Betty,” I said. “I told you the story.”

  “Tell it to me again,” she said, like a teacher prompting a not-very-smart student. “Maybe it will convince you this is a story.”

  “It happened last summer,” I said. “Betty hung around the Last Word.”

  “The newspaper bar,” said Rita.

  “Right.”

  “I’ve never been there,” she said.

  “You haven’t missed a thing. The Word is a dingy place where the staff goes to complain about editors and talk about what they would do if they ran the paper. The draft beer tastes off because Terry, the bartender, doesn’t keep the lines clean. The tables wobble and have match-books under the legs. The tops are sticky with old spilled drinks and the ashtrays overflow. The floor crunches and rustles with empty peanut bags, spilled chips, and dropped pretzels.”

  “Sounds like a lot of old bars,” Rita said.

  “It’s not. It has a mean and nasty atmosphere. You go there to gripe and grouse, get drunk and cheat. I stay away from the Last Word, unless I want to get really depressed. But I was there the night BJ Betty’s story broke. Betty was a brassy little blonde with a haystack of bleached hair. She always wore a tight black skirt and red spike heels. She had knobby knuckles and long red nails. The red-painted nail on her little finger glittered with a rhinestone. Betty had oddly big, bony feet for someone so small, but I doubt the guys got much past her bulging blouse.”

  “They never do,” sniffed Rita.

  “Betty’s name was her specialty. She had oral sex with a lot of reporters, copy editors, phone clerks, and even a few printers in the back of her white Cadillac. It was kind of a ritual. Betty would come in, order a strawberry daiquiri, which Terry the bartender al
ways grumped about making. Terry hated froufrou drinks.”

  “He probably didn’t want to clean the blender,” said Rita, who used to work part-time at a bar.

  “Betty’s order was the signal for one of the guys to sit down beside her. If Betty liked him, and the woman made Will Rogers look like a snob, she’d let him pay for her drink. After a couple of rounds, the guy would ostentatiously escort Betty, a little wobbly now on those red heels, out the back door to the parking lot. About half an hour later, he’d come back alone, grinning.”

  “Hah. Men. They’re all alike,” said Rita.

  “Charlie was one of her regular escorts,” I said, trying to continue. The beer was definitely taking its toll on Rita.

  “Is he that little short, balding shit I met that time I toured the paper?” growled Rita.

  “Some of my best friends are short,” I teased her. “Anyway, these days we say Charlie is vertically challenged.”

  “That’s not the problem. He has mean, shifty eyes. I don’t trust him.”

  I didn’t either, but I’d had to find out the hard way. I never could figure out how Rita sized the little creep up so fast.

  “Charlie said he liked BJ Betty because he didn’t have to lie to The Wife. I never heard Charlie use the woman’s first name. Maybe she was baptized The. ‘If The Wife asks me if I’ve ever slept with Betty, I can tell her no. Well, I didn’t sleep with her, did I?’ he said, winking. ‘I didn’t go to bed with her, either.’ ”

  “See, a sneaky little shit,” said Rita. It sounded shocking coming out of her mouth. She used the S-word only on her Peppermill afternoons.

  “Some guys would ask Betty for a little more than oral sex and she would say, ‘Oh, no, honey. Not today. It’s my time, you know.’ Few complained. They’d rather have Betty’s specialty anyway.

  “One night five or six guys got to bragging in the bar about Betty’s talented tongue. One of them mentioned he wanted to go all the way, but Betty said it was ‘her time’ this week.

  “ ‘Yeah? She told me it was her time last week,’ said Dick.

  “ ‘She told me it was her time the week before that,’ said Jim.

  “ ‘Who cares?’ said Charlie. ‘She’ll never come whining to you that she’s pregnant.’

  “A fat old beat cop who used to work the Stroll was listening to this conversation. He started laughing. I suspect he was ticked off because the Gazette had just done its Doughnuts to Diners exposé, revealing some city cops had free doughnuts or dinners at local diners. The owners gave them free food because there were fewer holdups in a diner full of blue uniforms.”

  “That series was a real revelation,” said Rita, sarcastically. “A lot of good cops got stung because they ate a burger.”

  I didn’t want to hear about it anymore. I continued my story.

  “Anyway, the fat cop said, ‘If you get Betty pregnant, you’ll wind up in the Guinness Book of Records.’

  “ ‘Why?’ said Charlie.

  “ ‘Guys can’t get pregnant,’ said the cop.

  “ ‘What’s that got to do with Betty?’ said Charlie.

  “ ‘She’s. A. He,’ said the cop, punctuating each word with a mean smile.

  “Charlie’s face turned the color of pork fat.

  “ ‘A guy?’ Charlie croaked, and drank his draft in one gulp.

  “ ‘Betty’s a bouncing boy, just about ready to get his final operation,’ said the cop, enjoying every word. ‘That’s why he never gives anything but blow jobs, he-man. You’ve been getting sucked off by a she-man.’ ”

  “Hee, hee, I loved that part,” Rita said.

  “Charlie’s smile did sort of curl up and slide off his face like a dead worm. He put some money on the bar and left. A lot of guys went home early that night. The men who stayed were the ones who’d never been with Betty in her white Cadillac, and they looked relieved. They claimed they could tell when they saw her Adam’s apple. But they couldn’t. Betty was darn good.”

  “Here’s the part I want you to pay attention to,” Rita said, still prompting her pupil to learn this lesson. “What happened the next night?”

  “The next night, when Betty’s Cadillac showed up on the back lot, Charlie and some of the guys were waiting for her. Or him. They beat up Betty so bad, Terry finally came out and made them stop. Betty’s blouse was ripped and she had bruises on her face and arms, but she’d managed to do some damage with her long fingernails and spike heels. Terry wanted to call an ambulance, but Betty didn’t want any trouble. She drove herself to the emergency room, bleeding all over the white interior. I heard Betty didn’t work her specialty for some time. She had to have her jaw wired. The cops asked if she wanted to press charges, but she said she fell in the parking lot.

  “She certainly fell from grace at the Word. Betty never showed up at the bar again.”

  “See what I’m saying? Those guys at the Last Word almost killed poor Betty when they found out what she was,” Rita said.

  “Yeah, if Terry hadn’t come to her rescue with that lead pipe he keeps under the cash register she would have been a goner,” I said.

  “I think that’s what happened to the poor thing they found on Bedler Street,” Rita said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because of what happened when those guys at work found out about Betty.”

  “It doesn’t mean that’s what happened to this person.”

  “It’s worth looking into,” Rita said.

  “It’s just another dead hooker,” I said.

  “I’m trying to give you a good story tip, but you’re not listening,” Rita snapped. “I better go. Thelma is at the back door.” Thelma was her next-door neighbor, eighty-eight years old. I knew she wasn’t really there, or I would have heard her yelling and rattling the door knob. Rita was irritated with me. She was also right. This was the second time I’d ignored a woman’s good advice. I would regret it.

  I finished my column by deadline, but I missed the story.

  “Being a columnist is like marrying a nymphomaniac. As soon as you finish, you have to start all over again.”

  A reader told me Ellen Goodman said that. Maybe she did, but Ellen always looked too prissy in that column photo to know much about nymphos. Besides, it sounded awfully politically incorrect. There’s no such thing, medically speaking. A nympho is what scared men call an unsatisfied woman.

  Still, I know what she means. A four-days-a-week column is insatiable. The thrill of servicing it is almost as good as sex. As soon as I finished one column, I needed another. And another. And another and another and another, until I was panting and exhausted. No wonder they say you put a newspaper to bed.

  I love it. I’d hate to have a real job. Talking to a palm reader in a bar beats digging ditches and working in factories, and I have relatives who do both. When I finished my Crystal Ball column five minutes before deadline, I was a happy woman. Today’s work was done. I could look forward to tomorrow’s with satisfaction. Because I had another fantastic subject, a hot and juicy one. I grabbed my briefcase and a fresh legal pad and headed out to the Louie the Ninth Motor Inn, near the airport.

  St. Louis is named for Louis IX, the saintly French warrior-king. If a saint who led two crusades to the Holy Land had to do any time in Purgatory after he died, I figure he spent it at the motel named after him, the Louie the Ninth. The decor was punishment enough. The Louie started out as a basic airport motel. It had a big high-ceilinged lobby fronting for a hollow two-story square of rooms. But the motel went slightly wacky when the present owners gave it a medieval theme.

  Now aluminum suits of armor stood in the lobby next to the standard motel overstuffed sofas and silk ficus trees. The Sheetrock walls were painted like gray castle stones. The high ceilings were hung with colorful banners, which made the place look more like a gas station tire sale than a medieval court. But most of the activities in King Louis’s namesake motel were far from saintly. The Louie was the site of swap meets
for bored married couples, swinging singles conventions, and gatherings of S and M aficionados, who loved the Dungeon cocktail lounge.

  The motel also hosted the conventions other motels wouldn’t touch: scary-weird sci-fi gatherings, comics conventions, and cat shows. Many hotels won’t take cat shows because nervous cats shed huge amounts of hair. The Louie’s ballrooms had a light layer of cat fluff in the corners. The people who used the Louie never complained. They were happy to find any place that would host their events. I think the Louie’s semimedieval staff uniforms contributed to the louche atmosphere. They certainly made me think about sex. The women employees were dressed like Lady Macbeth in long, trailing gowns that emphasized their breasts. The men wore tabards and hose. I have a theory that most men have great legs. The Louie proved I was right.

  I tried not to stare at the bellperson with the muscular legs set off by dark green tights. Instead, I went straight to a pale, ponytailed blonde behind the information desk. A Gothic plastic name tag announced that my informant was Tiffany. Tiffany wore her cheap blue gown with the dignity of a Plantagenet princess. Princess Tiffany was talking on the phone to a friend. She looked at me disdainfully, and rightly so. If I was at the Louie, I was probably up to no good.

  “I’m looking for the Miss American Gender Bender Pageant,” I said, confirming her suspicions.

  The pale princess pointed around the corner, not deigning to speak to me. The noise guided me the rest of the way—shrieks, squeals, and shrill girlish laughter. Standing in front of the Crusader Ballroom were some of the tallest women with the biggest hair I’d ever seen. The sequins on their dresses were as blinding as searchlights. They wore more mascara than a Barbie doll. In fact, they looked rather like giant Barbie dolls, with exaggerated busts, major makeup, dangly earrings, and drop-dead gowns.