Rubout Read online

  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 f
und?”

  “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.

  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, sound
ing 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.”