Backstab

by Elaine Viets

  For years, Burt’s was a neighborhood bar. Then he was discovered by the city’s movers and shakers. Now you could spot them after midnight, hanging around the watering hole and trying to figure out why X was with Y and what it meant in their ugly little jungle. Burt gave me the credit for his late-life success, but I never thought I’d done much. If I hadn’t written about Burt’s, someone else would have. It’s no great feat for a journalist to find a saloon.

  It was crowded at Burt’s, but we found a table. Instead of Sally, the waitress, Burt himself came over to take our drinks order—a high honor on a busy night. “Francesca,” he said, a big smile lighting up his face. “You haven’t been in here for months. I thought you forgot about me.”

  “Never, Burt. You’re looking good these days.”

  “Awww, I’m just a hardheaded old Dutchman,” said Burt, blushing like a boy. “We never change.”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  Burt quickly got down to business. “What can I get you?” We ordered our drinks. Burt brought them and disappeared back behind the bar. He had too many customers to chat with me for long.

  Ralph talked for a while about the female impersonators. I asked him what would happen to the contest’s losers and dropouts. “Some are headed for trouble, like the Shady Lady. Rumor has it she’s doing too many drugs. Sue Warrior will probably get her act together if she bounces her boy friend. I hear Maria Callous has a steady sweetie and may settle down for a while.”

  But I could tell his mind was elsewhere. He was restless and worried, and that made him wheeze. He took a hit on his inhaler. He wanted to tell me something, and eventually he’d get around to it. Finally he did.

  “I had to cash in a lot of favors to get you into that pageant,” he said. “You can write anything you want about us. We’re different, but we have feelings. We get hurt. Please don’t make us look like freaks.”

  I patted his hand. I was a freak, too. It just didn’t show as much.

  “I’ll be careful, Ralph,” I said.

  I left some money on the table, and waved to Burt as I walked out the door. It was near closing, and he was busy cleaning up behind the bar. I didn’t stop to say good-bye. I didn’t know it was the last time I’d see Burt alive.

  The next day, I woke up early and energetic. The morning matched my mood—sunny. I dressed for work and decided to fix myself breakfast instead of eating a bagel in the car. I rummaged in the fridge, found a poppy-seed bagel that wasn’t too stale, and toasted it. Then I fried an egg. Perfect. It was sunnyside-up, the yolk slightly runny, just the way I like it.

  I plopped the egg on the toasted bagel and took a bite. The yolk broke, slid through the bagel hole, and ran down my suit. The rest of the day was going to slide down a hole, too. I just didn’t know it yet.

  I got dressed again and drove to work, still convinced that it was a good day. It had to be. It was fifty degrees in February, and I swore I could smell spring—along with the city blend of smog and freshly brewed beer.

  I found my desktop piled high with mail from readers. Another sign things were going right. I love my mail. There’s always something to make me laugh. Today, a seventy-seven-year-old woman had sent me a photo of her cat watching Wheel of Fortune. A group of outdoorsy guys invited me once again to go on their annual February float trip to the Ozarks. They know my idea of roughing it is a hotel with no room service.

  I was in such a good mood, I even laughed at a letter addressed to “Francesca Vierling, Whore of the CG” on my desk. Jeez, I always thought I was fairly discreet. The envelope had my name printed in black letters with SS lightning bolts. The inside wasn’t quite so funny. The lined notebook paper was covered with homemade lightning bolts and shaky swastikas. The writing was more black printing, underlined with three colors. All sure signs of a nutcase. Yep. The letter was signed by the “Aryan Avenger.” It began formally. “Dear Whore of the CG: You liberal bitches are all alike….” I didn’t bother to read the rest.

  I wrote my column on the female impersonators and liked it so much I called my friend and mentor, Georgia T. George. Georgia was fifty-five, a small, smart, elfin blonde who wore the ugliest, boxiest gray suits money could buy. At a successful paper, she’d be managing editor. But the Gazette papers had never had a woman ME, and I didn’t think they ever would. Not without a lawsuit. The St. Louis City Gazette was one paper in a chain of mediocre multimedia money-makers owned by a Boston family. The publisher kept a mansion in St. Louis for his rare visits here, but lived in the East. Decisions came out of corporate headquarters in Boston.

  Corporate headquarters made Hadley the managing editor. He belonged to the right clubs, wore the right clothes, could talk culture with the Harvard-educated publisher—when he condescended to come to town—hold his coat and tell him what he wanted to hear. Hadley was no leader. The paper was hemorrhaging circulation. Morale was poor. The staff sniped at each other instead of working together. The Gazette was hated in its own community as aloof and arrogant. But Hadley was a genius for two reasons: First, he convinced the snobbish publisher that these problems were the fault of the stupid readers, not the stupid editors. Second, he kept profits high by cutting expenses and staff and hiring inexperienced young reporters and copy editors. Then he overworked them. They made a lot of mistakes, but it cost nothing to run a correction.

  Georgia tried to explain to the publisher that this way of operating hurt quality, and ultimately, profits. Her career suffered for her candor. She could have transferred to another paper or a TV station in the giant Gazette chain, but she stayed in St. Louis because she loved the easy, comfortable life here, and the fourteen-room penthouse overlooking Forest Park for the price of a one-bedroom co-op in New York. At the paper, she was equally comfortable. As assistant managing editor for features, Georgia rated an office on Rotten Row, the string of private offices for newsroom execs. Each one was the size of a shower stall and had about as much charm. But in an overcrowded open newsroom, privacy was a coveted perk. I didn’t want to be seen running into her office too often, so at work we usually talked on the phone.

  She answered her phone with a sharp bark. “Georgia George.”

  “Got a minute? Call up my column for Tuesday and let me know what you think,” I said.

  “What are you trying to slip by Charlie now?” she asked warily.

  Georgia is the only person at the paper I trust to tell me when a column is lousy or a joke doesn’t work. Georgia was unflinchingly honest, even when I didn’t want her to be.

  She called me back ten minutes later. “I love it,” she said. “But you better have a backup. You know, Miz Condom on the Grapefruit, that Hadley is on one of his morality kicks.”

  “But I ran the idea past Charlie and he said to go for it,” I said.

  “I’ve also told you what Charlie means when he says that. Grab your ass and kiss it good-bye,” she said.

  Like many newswomen, Georgia could be coarse. Newsmen generally kept their maidenly modesty, and rarely uttered a vulgar word. Newswomen showed they were tough by talking tough. In Georgia’s case, she was genuinely tough. I knew she’d faced down a high-powered lawyer with a shady client who threatened her with a career-busting lawsuit. The Gazette had exposed his crooked client. Sometimes, even when the Gazette was right, its wimpy lawyers would settle out of court because they thought some lawsuits were too expensive to defend. Georgia stood her ground, the lawyer with the exposed client blinked, and the Gazette’s honor and her career were saved.

  Georgia had saved my career, too. She was the one who’d opened my eyes to good-time Charlie. Ten years ago, when I had just started writing my column, I used to think that Charlie was my friend and mentor. He was always advising me on how to deal with Hadley. He told me I had to take a firm line with the managing editor. He urged me to go into Hadley’s office and confront him. So I did. I didn’t get anywhere, but I felt a lot better after I screamed at him. And it made me a hero to the staff. I was the brave woman who talke
d back to Hadley Harris the Third.

  Charlie’s advice advanced me all right. He almost advanced me right out of the newsroom. I probably never would have figured out what Charlie was up to if Georgia T. George hadn’t taken me under her wing. In those days I knew her only as a distant figure, one of the Gazette’s rare women editors. She was frighteningly smart. She existed on another plane, far above Charlie’s crowd. We said hello in the hall, but that was about it. Then I wrote my notorious Chicken Plucker column. It never made the paper, but the entire newsroom surreptitiously called it up on their computer screens and read it.

  I wrote about the Rialto, an exclusive St. Louis men’s club, which refused to admit women members because the men liked to swim nude in the club’s penthouse pool.

  I wrote, “The Rialto is supposed to be the club for the city’s movers and shakers. Most of them are shakers, or at least tremblers. The average age of a Rialto member is a frisky seventy-five. The Rialto refuses to admit women to the club because it says it will have to discontinue its nude swimming. The club spokesman who told me this was a scrawny old gentleman. Without his exquisitely tailored suit, he would look rather like a plucked chicken. So would most of the other club members. The thought of all those old pluckers naked in that pool is enough to make a woman take the veil.”

  Hadley was a member of the Rialto (and a scrawny old plucker to boot). When he saw that column on the “Family” page proof, he killed it instantly.

  Charlie said he would back me all the way on this one. He advised me to go in and yell at Hadley. “Shouting is the only way to make an impression on that guy,” Charlie said. “It takes guts, but he’ll respect you. Go in there and do it now. I’ll back you to the hilt.” After Charlie’s pep talk, I was ready. I was stalking across the newsroom to give Hadley what-for when I was intercepted by Georgia T. George.

  “Can I see you in my office?” she said sternly.

  Everyone standing nearby assumed she had been delegated to chew me out. That’s what I thought, too. She looked so small and fierce. I followed her into her office. She shut the door, another sign trouble was brewing. “Let me guess,” she said. “You are on your way to Hadley’s office to give him a piece of your mind.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He killed my column. He needs to be confronted.”

  “And Charlie told you to do that?” she asked.

  “Yes, Charlie’s very good about advising me on how to deal with Hadley. He’s one of my best friends at the paper. He said he’d back me to the hilt.”

  “Would you like to see what your friend Charlie wrote about you?” she said. “I’ll show you.” Georgia had a high security clearance, so she could read the memos on the HADLEY desk in the computer system. This was where the upper editors sent reports they could look at, but the deckhands couldn’t see.

  Charlie wrote this memo to Hadley: “I am very concerned about Francesca’s hysterical mood swings. She has become verbally abusive to some of the men on the staff. I believe she has taken a dislike to mature males. She told me she was ‘going to give that old goat Hadley a piece of my mind.’ I tried to stop her, but if she comes into your office screaming and violent, I recommend she be severely disciplined. These outbursts must be stopped.”

  For a minute, I didn’t say anything. I felt numb. I could hear a strange blank sound in my head like running water.

  “He backed me to the hilt all right,” I said, bitterly. “He put the knife right in my back, the self-righteous little sneak. Let me take that sawed-off snake out on the back lot and beat the tar out of him.”

  “You will do nothing of the kind,” Georgia said, and she sounded like Sister Mary Grace, the principal at my grade school. “That is simply another version of what he wants—a show of violence on your part. You are not going to star in the scene Charlie has written for you. You will not touch him. You will not say a word in anger. Do not let him know you have found out about his double-dealing. Now get your coat, get outside, and cool off. Go do some interviews. I do not want to see you in this office the rest of the day.”

  It was the first of a lot of good advice from my new mentor. But today I was feeling cocky enough with the female impersonator column to discount Georgia’s advice. Especially when she wanted to cut my favorite line. “I suggest that you can any mention of Maria, the Ass with Class,” she said. “That’s the first thing that’s going to be cut. It may set off Hadley.”

  “You know my theory,” I said. “I deliberately put in something that he can take out in the first three paragraphs. Then he leaves in the stuff I want.”

  Nine times out of ten my theory works. This was time Number Ten. Georgia warned me, but I didn’t listen. After all, it was a good day. I even finished writing early. I sent the column to Charlie’s computer desk at two o’clock, four hours ahead of my deadline. Thirty minutes later, Hadley’s secretary, Nelson (Hadley believed male secretaries were classier than females), was at my desk. That meant Hadley was requesting an audience.

  “Mr. Harris and Charlie would like to see you in Mr. Harris’s office,” Nelson said.

  “How serious is it?” I asked. If things weren’t too bad, Nelson would joke with me. This time he said nothing. Uh-oh.

  It was a short trip across the newsroom to Hadley’s office. Like walking the plank. Hadley’s office looked like a newspaper museum. There were framed front pages going back to World War I. A wooden California job case with my favorite typeface, classic Caslon, designed by Londoner William Caslon in the eighteenth century. Small tools ranging from a pica stick to an eye-gouging copy spike on an ornate green metal base. Hadley even had a Mergenthaler Linotype machine from the late 1890s in his office. The landmark typesetting machine was big as an upright piano. I bet it was a bitch to dust.

  The real museum piece was Hadley himself. Hadley longed for the good old days of newspapers, when editors could ignore life’s ambiguities. News was clearly defined: accidents, government scandals, crimes against white people, and fires, floods, and other natural disasters. The only sex was in court cases about divorces, contested wills, and paternity suits, and none of these scandals were about the publisher’s friends. Women stayed on the women’s page. Women’s issues were society parties, bridge clubs, fashion, children, and recipes. Rape, race, sex discrimination, syphilis, suicide, and child abuse were politely ignored, like a fart in church. As for men with tits like women’s, you could snigger about them with the boys at the bar, but you didn’t write about them in a newspaper.

  Hadley was sitting behind his desk. He hadn’t taken a chair in his conversation group by the Mergenthaler Linotype machine. Another bad sign. He did not want a friendly chat. Charlie stood alertly beside him. He was so short, his head barely came to the top of Hadley’s tall leather chair.

  Hadley did the talking. “You have done your best to undermine the management of this newspaper,” he said, his face pink with anger.

  I thought the editors did a good job of undermining themselves. But for once I didn’t answer back.

  “This is the second time this month you’ve tried to sneak smut into a family newspaper,” he said, making it sound like I was corrupting little children. “It is bad enough that you write about perverts. But now you’re insulting the African American community.”

  “I am?” I said, genuinely bewildered. “How?”

  “Chocolate Suicide,” said Charlie, helpfully. He was eager to elaborate. “We read your column and then looked at Jimbo’s pictures. This Chocolate person is African American.”

  “Yes?” I still didn’t get it.

  Hadley said, “At a time when the leaders of the African American community are demanding that their people be portrayed with sensitivity and dignity, you have featured a sexual deviant. In my newspaper. I am sick of your sick mind.”

  His voice had grown higher, his face pinker. The guy really was a wimp. In two seconds he was going to start pounding his desk. It’s the only trick he knows for looking strong. “I am sick of your smut, smut, s
mut,” he said, pounding his desk until he sent an avalanche of papers to the floor. Naturally, Charlie bent over and picked them up.

  “Chocolate Suicide is a self-created work of art, and a performer with great energy and style,” I said. “I thought I treated her and the other female impersonators, black, white, and Asian, with dignity and sympathy. But if you’re concerned, I can make whatever changes you suggest.”

  “I am making one change,” snapped Hadley. His color turned from delicate pink to dangerous red, and his voice rose to a teakettle scream. “I am killing your disgusting column. Killing it, do you hear? Get another subject by six o’clock and make it a wholesome one. I’m putting you on notice now. I don’t want you writing about perverts, smut, or sex. I want family values in my newspaper.”

  “I’ll make sure, sir,” said Charlie, and I could swear the little creep was smirking.

  I left Hadley’s office. The newsroom was strangely quiet. People were pretending to type and to talk on the phone, but no one looked my way. That meant they heard every word Hadley screamed at me.

  I sat down at my desk, dazed and furious. The phone rang. It was Georgia. “He killed your column, didn’t he?” she said.

  “Yes. You were right. Charlie used it as a chance to run into Hadley’s office and start trouble. I know he’s the one who got Hadley fired up. Tried a new tack this time—I’m guilty of writing smut AND insulting the African American community.”

  “That is a new one,” said Georgia. “I’ll have to watch the little insect. Offending the African American community is the newest newsroom witch-hunt. A few charges of racism and you’re in trouble, whether they’re true or not.”

  “I have three hours to come up with another column, and I’m too angry to think straight,” I said. “What am I going to do?”

  “Something will turn up,” she said. “It always does.”

  She was right about that one, too. When I picked up the phone to make a call I heard the soft boop boop sound that means there’s a message on my voice mail. It was Burt’s wife, Dolores. I hadn’t spoken to her in six months, but I remembered her as a salty, hearty woman who talked a blue streak. Now she formed each word slowly, as if she could hardly talk. Her normally cheerful voice was a dull croak. “Francesca. Dolores. It’s Burt. He’s dead. I hate to bother you, but I need you to come to the bar. There’s TV people runnin’ around all over here. You know those people. You can talk to them. Please? For Burt?”