Backstab

by Elaine Viets

  No. Not Burt. The room slipped sideways. I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. I just saw him last night, and he looked fine. I knew he was seventy years old, and a heart attack could happen anytime at that age, but Burt looked so sturdy. He never missed a day of work. He was always there behind his bar, and as long as he was alive, so was a little piece of my grandparents’ neighborhood, the South Side, the world I grew up in.

  I knew the old South Side was dying. Some would say it was already dead. The tough old Germans who’d lived there were gradually dying off. The city called them the Scrubby Dutch, a corruption of “Deutsch,” the word for German, for their maddening habit of cleaning everything. For the Scrubby Dutch, cleanliness wasn’t next to godliness. It was better.

  They were hardheaded, hardworking people with an earthy sense of humor. They staffed City Hall and ran the shops and saloons. They lived in small brick houses with neat zoysia grass lawns. They had character. They were characters. They were my people and I never felt at home around anyone else. Now the last of them were Burt’s age or better. They were dying or retiring to Florida or moving into the Altenheim nursing home. Their children had left for the suburbs years ago. Their South Side houses were being bought by people never seen before on the South Side—young married rehabbers, gay couples, Asian immigrants, and middle-class blacks. Those people gave the South Side a new richness and variety. But some of the newcomers weren’t an improvement. They bought South Side houses and flats cheap, and turned them into rundown investment properties. These greedy landlords rented to drug dealers, muggers, and hookers, male and female. The safe, solid German neighborhoods were disappearing, especially in the area where Burt and Dolores lived. Dolores had been after him to move his bar to the suburbs, but Burt wouldn’t leave his beloved city, no matter how much it changed.

  “I was born here, and I’ll die here,” he’d say. And so he did. The stubborn South Siders generally did what they wanted, no matter what it cost them or the people who loved them. I sighed. It didn’t matter that I saw Burt maybe twice a year. I was crazy about the obstinate old guy. They didn’t make them like Burt anymore.

  I had to park two blocks away, there were so many vehicles in front of Burt’s Bar: at least four police patrol cars parked at odd angles, six unmarked cars, a white police evidence van, an orange-and-white EMS ambulance, and three TV trucks. They must have picked up the news from the police scanner. Actually, the TV reporters and camera people were behaving very well, considering this was the murder of a newsworthy figure. They were shooting stand-ups and footage of the building and interviewing passersby. Plainclothes officers were doing door-to-door interviews. Scene commanders—uniformed officers in blinding white shirts—were giving television interviews.

  All the cameras swung to the front of the building as the door opened. They were taking Burt out of his bar as I walked up to the brick building. The man who loomed so large in life made a pitifully small bundle in the white body bag. I felt strangely numb watching them take him away. The blackness began closing in on me in an odd honeycomb effect, with red around the edges. Just before I slid down the brick wall to the sidewalk, I heard a voice call me from far away: “Francesca, are you okay?”

  That brought me back. The blackness cleared away, and I saw that Homicide Detective Sergeant Mark Mayhew had me by the arm. An old-style homicide detective who looked like his wife bought his clothes on sale at JCPenney in 1977—just before she left him. Mayhew belonged to the new breed. He looked like an artsy monochrome ad in GQ: steel-gray cashmere jacket, a pearlgray sweater so soft you wanted to pet it, perfectly cut charcoal pants. Dynamite tailoring. Decent guy, too.

  “I’m a little dizzy. I didn’t eat any lunch,” I said.

  We both knew why I had almost passed out. But Mayhew was a good man, so he didn’t remind me. As for me, I would think about it later. Right now, I had to see Dolores. “For some reason, Dolores called me,” I said. “She said she needed help with the TV people, but they don’t seem to be a problem.”

  “She probably didn’t want to be alone with strangers. It will take a while for her son to get here from way out in Chesterfield,” said Mark. “But you know these old krauts—too proud to ask for help straight out.”

  Mark steered me around the yellow Police Line tape, and inside the bar. I recognized the homey smell of chicken and dumplings, the day’s special, still chalked on the board by the cash register. Dolores was sitting in one of the back booths, but the big, robust woman I knew wasn’t there. She seemed to have shrunk. Her jolly round body looked flabby. Her face seemed to sag and run, like melting wax.

  “I told him and I told him this neighborhood wasn’t safe,” Dolores said to the two uniformed officers sitting with her. I could tell she’d been repeating this story, like a continuously running tape.

  “But he wouldn’t listen. He sent me home at one thirty when we stopped serving lunch, we only live a block away, you know, and he said he’d close up. Lunch is over at two and it takes ten minutes to close up. He should have been home by two fifteen. He always is. We reopen at four. He needs his rest in the afternoon, he’s not so young anymore. When I didn’t hear from him by two thirty I called over here and there was no answer. He could have been on his way home, but I just had a funny feeling, so I called 911 and came running. I found him in the kitchen with my own butcher knife in his back. The stubborn old son of a buck.” She began to cry and the cops looked uncomfortable. Then she would wipe her eyes and blow her nose and start the tape again. “I told him and I told him this neighborhood wasn’t safe….”

  I looked over toward Dolores’s domain, her spotless stainless steel kitchen, and the first thing I thought was that the place was a mess and she was going to be really mad. There was a puddle of blood on the waxed floor, and long streaks on the counter and the cream-colored wall. It didn’t look like movie blood. It was the wrong color, too red and too bright. Besides the blood there was black fingerprint powder on everything, yellow Police Line tape blocking the entrance to the kitchen, a paper silhouette of a body on the floor, and footprints tracked all over Dolores’s shiny clean tile.

  Then I realized something else. Burt didn’t die of a heart attack. He was murdered. Stabbed in the back, it sounded like, if my dull wits were working.

  “How did he die?” I asked Mayhew.

  “Stabbed. Several times in the back. With a butcher knife. My guess is the killer got the aorta. If you’re pissed off, you can stab anyone and kill them. Whoever did this got a lucky hit along the left side of the backbone. At least Burt died quick.”

  “Shouldn’t there be more blood?” I thought if I kept talking, I might keep from thinking about another murder, a long time ago. There was a lot of blood then, on the walls and the floor and even the ceiling, and some of it dripped off a light fixture. In my dreams, I didn’t see the two bodies. I saw that drip.

  “Most of the blood’s inside the body, in the chest cavity.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill Burt?” I kept rattling on, hardly taking it in.

  “Money. They cleaned out the cash register. It was right after lunch, and the whole neighborhood knew he closed at 2:00 P.M. The killer didn’t get that much, either. Took the cash and change in the register—Dolores thinks it was maybe two hundred dollars—but didn’t look under the money drawer, where Burt kept the big bills. Missed about seven hundred dollars that way.”

  “How did they miss that much money?” I didn’t think much of the local criminal class, but one thing they wouldn’t miss was cash. Even I knew Burt stashed most of his tens, twenties, and fifties under the cash drawer. The local boys would, too.

  “Probably got scared off,” Mayhew said.

  I didn’t think someone who would knife Burt in broad daylight would pass up a pile of dead presidents just because they heard a noise.

  Also, Burt was a city bartender. That meant he was cautious. When he let out the last lunch customer, he’d lock the door, and he’d never open up for the to
ugh-looking kids in baggy gang clothes who slouched down the street. And if he did, he’d never turn his back on them so he could be stabbed with Dolores’s own butcher knife.

  Before I could say this, I heard Dolores call my name. “Francesca, honey, is that you?” She’d stopped the tape long enough to notice me. I went over to her table.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Burt was a good man.” I wanted to say something else, something profound or something that could ease her pain. But there was no comfort for Dolores, and there wouldn’t be. “He wouldn’t listen,” Dolores said. “I told him and I told him….” The tape started again.

  The two young, sad-faced cops turned her over to me. I sat with her in the booth and held her hand and patted her shoulder and listened to her say the same things over and over until her son Harry arrived from his accounting office in Chesterfield. Dolores and Burt had worked hard to give their kids the best, and all six of them had turned out well. They had nice families and good homes and solid businesses in the safest suburbs. The other grown children would be coming in now, one by one. I handed Dolores over to her son Harry, and she began to cry, hard, harsh sobs that sounded like parts of her were being ripped out. He held her. He knew what to do.

  I did, too. I left. I wanted to give Burt one last gift—the obituary he deserved. I wanted to send him off in style. I wanted everyone to know that he was a fine man, and to understand that a well-run bar took diplomacy, discipline, and hard work.

  I didn’t go back to the newsroom to write the column. I only had two hours until deadline, and I needed quiet. I sat down at my home computer, and I began to remember all the stories about Burt. Hadley would be happy with this column. Burt’s life was as wholesome as you could get. He dropped out of high school to go to work in his family’s saloon at age sixteen. He fought for his country in World War II. Heck, Burt was such a gung ho patriot, he’d lied about his age and gone into the Navy at age seventeen. He came back with a fistful of medals and married his grade-school sweetheart, and they worked together every day for the next fifty-one years, except for the one-week vacation Dolores made Burt take every August.

  I think my favorite Burt story was something that happened two years ago. That was after Burt’s Bar became fashionable, and all the local celebrities and politicians started hanging around his bar. Burt had a whole paragraph in USA Today as one of the nation’s top ten bars. The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and People magazine wrote about him. The BBC interviewed him for a series called All-American Pubs.

  It didn’t seem as though Burt changed a bit once he became famous. Until he told me he’d bought a hot tub. I didn’t believe him. So he took me home to his plain brick two-family flat. We walked up that dark old stairway, past the brown three-piece living room suite he bought at the Fair-Mercantile furniture store thirty years ago, through the kitchen with the South Side National Bank calendar, and out to the sunporch.

  The sunporch had the usual South Side plants: red geraniums and tall, skinny mother-in-law tongues growing in red Folgers coffee cans, scraggly philodendrons, and a fat new Boston fern that was obviously a Mother’s Day present from one of the kids. But instead of the usual sagging slipcovered couches or wicker furniture you find on most city sunporches, there was this giant redwood hot tub. There was a silver wine bucket on a stand next to it, and a thick cushiony rug on the floor.

  I couldn’t get over it. Somehow, that sybaritic scene didn’t go with Burt’s stern Scrubby Dutch upbringing. I couldn’t imagine Burt and Dolores bobbing around in the steaming tub, sipping white wine. I told him so.

  “There’s a lot you can’t imagine about us,” he said, and winked. “You young folks are so stodgy. Think you invented sex. She’s still the only woman for me after almost fifty years, and we still have fun, more fun now that the kids have moved out. Besides, the hot tub makes my feet feel good after a day at the bar.”

  I loved that story. I thought about Dolores, alone now after fifty-one years. I started to cry, but decided to save it for later. Right now, I had work to do. I owed him a good good-bye.

  Besides, if I wrote about Burt, I wouldn’t have to think about the other murder. The one that took place when I was nine. I wouldn’t have to remember all that blood, dripping, dripping, dripping.

  I guess I should tell you what half the city knows anyway. It’s the reason I started to pass out at Burt’s Bar. Burt wasn’t the first murder victim I’ve seen. My mother murdered my father, then shot herself. This happened twenty-eight years ago. I was nine.

  It was a big scandal because my parents were supposed to be such fine, upstanding church people. They lived in a suburb called Crestwood, in a split-level house with a carport and, in the front yard, a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary. Dad was a pillar of our parish church, and Mom did a lot of charity work.

  The media acted as if Harriet had offed Ozzie. If you were living in St. Louis then, it was all over the newspapers and TV, and was talked about on KMOX radio for almost a week. There was a famous photo of me at their graveside, wearing white gloves and a little blue coat and staring into space. To most people, it is the picture of heartbreak.

  If anyone had asked me, I would have told them my parents weren’t quite the perfect young churchgoing couple the press painted them to be. Oh, they were religious all right. At least, they spent a lot of time at church. But they both drank too much. Nobody caught them at it, because they were weekend boozers. This brand of drunk can carry on for a lot longer than your ordinary get-smashed-every-night type. Mom and Dad got through the week with a few beers before dinner, and a few drinks when they went out in the evening. But I remember them with a beer or whiskey sour in their hands from Friday night through Sunday, when the hangover hit them like a truck full of bricks. They went to bed early on Sunday night. By the time Monday rolled around, Dad was sitting soberly in his office, and Mom was busily doing good.

  They also fought all the time, but they were smart enough to keep the fights at home. They had loud, screaming battles where Mom broke things and Dad cursed and Mom cried and I hid in my room. I was an only child, so I had a room to myself. My mother did it up in pink and ruffles, because I was a girl. Actually, I hated pink AND ruffles. I also hated being a girl.

  Everyone thought Mom and Dad were madly in love. In public, she called him Babydoll and he couldn’t keep his hands off her. He was always patting her ass and petting her arm and squeezing her shoulders. Wives used to ask their husbands, “Why don’t you pay attention to me like that?”

  The trouble was Dad couldn’t keep his hands off any woman. He played around. I think that’s probably what drove her over the edge—his fooling around, plus the drinking. I figured out about his lady friends at age five, when Dee, the divorced redhead (well, orangehead, actually, but the color looked sexy on her) who lived down the street started inviting me to come over and play at her house. Even at age five, I suspected that ladies who wore gold ankle bracelets and that much perfume weren’t interested in little girls who asked a lot of questions. Dee bought me a beautiful purple tea set made of real china and let me play with it in her basement rec room, which was a cool turquoise and gray. After I played awhile, pouring tap water into the pot and then into the cups and then serving several pretend friends, Dad would come over to Dee’s and take me home. One day I came up out of the rec room early to get more tea water and saw him kissing Dee in a way he never kissed Mom, and I knew Dee didn’t give me the tea set because she liked me. I went back downstairs to the rec room and broke every piece in the tea set.

  There were other women besides Dee, and they all lived in the neighborhood. All but Dee were married. I usually could tell when one was having an affair with Dad, because she would play up to me, telling me how smart or cute I was, or offering to fix my hair. It made me real suspicious about women. Men, too. I didn’t like how Dad used me for cover with his ladies. I never said anything to Mom, because we didn’t get along. I was tall and skinny, and she thought I was ugly and told
me so. Often. I felt kind of sorry for her. I thought she might have been happier if she’d had my cousin Linda for a daughter. Linda had blond hair that went into soft natural curls. She was graceful and not too tall. She took ballet lessons and wore pretty dresses and never got them dirty. She put doll dresses on kittens. She joined the Girl Scouts and earned so many merit badges she hardly had room to sew them all on her sash. Linda was two years older than me, but I used to fantasize that maybe our moms got us mixed up on a visit and my mom took the wrong girl home. Mom used to dress me in Linda’s castoff clothes, but I never looked as good in them as Linda did.

  I never knew how much Mom knew about Dad’s lady friends. Mom was angry a lot. Maybe she was hungover or maybe she suspected what Dad was up to with the women. One story will give you an idea of what she was like, and I’ll tell it because it kinda has a happy ending. I don’t talk about Mom much. I’m not looking for sympathy. It’s over. Anyway, I was nine and she’d been trying to brush my hair for church and it didn’t look the way she wanted and she screamed, “You’re hopeless, I can’t do a thing with you,” and she hit me in the face with the hairbrush, which left a red mark. I got out of going to church that Sunday. That was the good part. I liked church even less than I liked Mom.

  It was shortly after the hairbrush incident that she found Dad in a clinch with Marcy, her best friend, at a New Year’s party. Mom and Dad had a huge, screaming fight right in front of thirty people at the party. Those people all told the police about it after the shooting. Mom and Dad had a bunch of fights at home after that. Every time Mom saw Dad, she’d scream insults at him. Once, she called him a lousy lay. I didn’t know what it meant then, but it made him mad. He never walked out, though. They stayed together, fighting and drinking. I hid out in my room and tried to stay out of their way.