Backstab

by Elaine Viets

  I got to Utah Place about ten the next morning, and parked my Jag out front. None of the neighbors complained, even though I was wearing my oldest jeans. I knew this was going to be a dirty job. I walked around back to the garage. The garage door was not locked. There was no reason. It was empty except for a stack of rusty window screens, a garden hose, and a slab of grayish marble like you find in bathrooms in old public buildings. The key was right where Sandra said it would be.

  I walked through the backyard and opened the kitchen door. The work on the first floor was finished, except for the final cleanup. I don’t know much about kitchens. My favorite appliance is the phone, and I can tell you every restaurant that delivers in thirty minutes. But Sandra’s kitchen was a knockout. The counter was covered with deep blue Mexican tiles. The stove looked like something you’d find in a five-star restaurant. I wondered what my scrambled egg would taste like if I cooked it on that baby. I liked the double sink, too. It looked big enough to hold a week’s unwashed dishes. Everything—the counter, the stove, and the floor—was covered with a gray film of plaster dust. It’s insidious, fine as face powder but gritty as sand.

  I walked through a dining room paneled in dark wood and a living room painted all white. The front hall was the size of my first apartment. It was the only room on the first floor that showed the signs of Ralph’s trauma. The grit on the hardwood floor was trampled with dozens of frantic footprints. Long stripes in the dust from the stretcher wheels went across the hall and up the wide, carved staircase. There were raw scrapes in the wood of the steps and a nasty gouge in the plaster on the landing where the EMS crew had swung the stretcher around the corner. Too bad they had no reason to hurry. Ralph was already dead when they arrived.

  The floor of the upstairs hall and the room with the primrose paper were covered with plastic drop cloths. The wide sliding doors were open, and I could see more plastic taped over the fireplace. The plaster had crumbled into bits about the size of gravel in a driveway. It crunched when I walked. I followed the footprints and wheel marks to the room where Ralph had died. At first, I couldn’t bring myself to look at the six-foot-square area by the ladder where the plaster was tracked over and pounded down. That’s where Ralph had died. Instead, I looked up at the work he’d been doing. He’d knocked out almost the whole ceiling, except for about three square feet in the far corner.

  Plaster is tricky. It can crack and fall on your head in the night when you’re asleep. But even old, bulging ceilings can be tenacious when you try to take them down. Ralph had to beat the stuff with a crowbar. I saw the crowbar he used, dropped on the floor. Nearby was a dented metal thermos and his battered old boom box, dusty and spattered with paint. I saw a grimy three-foot pile of Big Gulps, foam coffee cups, and White Castle bags. I saw a blue dust mask, the elastic band broken. I saw everything but an orange-and-yellow Proventil inhaler.

  I began searching the room systematically. I started in the corner closest to the fireplace, sifting through the dust and debris, moving the larger chunks of plaster with the crowbar. I found Ralph’s almost new red toolbox under a tarp, his tools neatly placed inside, with compartments for the duct tape, nails, screws, and washers. He was a fanatic about caring for his tools. If only he’d taken care of himself so well. I found his jeans jacket, folded next to the toolbox. I found a bag of petrified jelly doughnuts and more empty coffee cups, a can of Spackle and a Red Devil putty knife. But no inhaler.

  I packed up the tools, thermos, jacket, and radio to take to his mother. Then I took a look at the aluminum stepladder. Like everything else in the room, it was coated with plaster dust. A dusty red bandanna hung on one step. A half-empty Big Gulp was on the top step. The inhaler should have been somewhere around there, too. He kept it in a pouch tied about halfway down on the ladder. Ralph had showed it to me once. “That’s my medical insurance,” he said. “Right within reach, in case of emergency.”

  His insurance had been canceled. The inhaler wasn’t there. But I did see the string that held the pouch. It had been cut. It was time to have a talk with my favorite homicide detective, Mark Mayhew. I waited till three o’clock that afternoon. I could usually find Mayhew in his office then, doing paperwork and drinking even worse coffee than the swill at the City Gazette. I called and he picked up on the first ring. “Mayhew,” he answered the phone.

  “It’s me, Francesca,” I said.

  “Of course it’s you, Francesca. I’d recognize that voice anywhere. You give great phone.” Mayhew was fun to talk to, but he never hit on me. He liked women. He loved his wife. If he fooled around, I didn’t know about it. He was a lot more discreet than some of the cops, who brought their girl friends into Uncle Bob’s.

  “How about if I give great lunch? I have something I want to run past you. Money’s no object, up to ten dollars or so. You want to go to Uncle Bob’s?”

  “Jeez, Francesca, don’t you ever eat anywhere else? You’re in such a rut.”

  “I like the food.”

  “Everything tastes like a pancake there. Even the coffee.”

  “I like Uncle Bob’s atmosphere. But if you want to go somewhere different, name it.”

  “Crown Candy Kitchen,” he said.

  “Crown makes Uncle Bob’s look like a health food restaurant,” I said.

  “You don’t want to go there?”

  “Of course I do. Sugar is one of the four food groups, along with alcohol, grease, and chocolate.”

  Crown was an old-fashioned city soda fountain, one of the last places where you could get a real chocolate malted and a handmade shake. Crown mixed them in tall metal cups, poured half into a footed fountain glass, and brought the rest in the metal cup to your table along with a shaker of nutmeg. It was a time warp, the sort of place where Archie and Veronica would hang out, lost in a tough city neighborhood. Crown even had those little jukebox selectors on the wall in each booth.

  For some reason, a lot of cops went there. They ate their ice cream like gunfighters in a Wild West saloon. The cops always took a corner table, and sat with their backs to the wall, so they could see the whole room and watch who came in the door. Once, just for fun, I took that seat and left Mark with his back to the door. He was so uncomfortable he could hardly concentrate on the conversation. I finally took pity and switched seats with him. This time, since I wanted a favor, I let him sit where he’d be comfortable, with his back to the wall. Mark had on a scrumptious outfit, like something on the menu at Crown: a butterscotch-brown corduroy sport coat and a rich-looking sweater the color of French vanilla ice cream. It set off the bulge of his shoulder holster nicely.

  Maybe eating ice cream helped him keep that choirboy face after what he’d seen. His skin was so clean and pink it looked like his mother had scrubbed him with her handkerchief before she let him out of the family car.

  “I’ll have a bowl of chili and a chocolate shake,” Mark told the waitress. Chili with a white sweater? I’d heard homicide detectives had a foolhardy streak.

  “I’ll skip the first course,” I said. “Just bring the shake.”

  She did. All the food showed up at once. The shakes were cold and magnificent concoctions that reduced us both to silence while we shoveled them in. These were shakes so thick you could eat them with a fork, but we used a spoon and a straw. Mark’s chili remained untouched. I figured he’d have it for dessert. But he was thinking about the fresh-made candy in the glass case by the front door. Maybe that’s why he took that seat, so he could watch the chocolate.

  “They have almond clusters,” he said. “My favorite.”

  “I’m waiting for the Easter candy,” I said. “Did you ever see the chocolate crosses? I wonder how you eat them. You know, with chocolate rabbits, you eat the ears first. What do you do with a chocolate cross? Bite off the arms first? Or the top part?”

  Mark looked at the ceiling. “We’re going to get struck by lightning.” He said it as a joke, but I could tell I was making him uneasy. Cop humor is as tasteless as reporter jok
es, but Mark didn’t like joking with civilians. I switched the subject to something less sacrilegious.

  “How’s it going with Burt? Did you get anywhere?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “There’s an office building right across the street. We questioned everyone. No one saw anything unusual. None of the indigenous local population”—his phrase for the tough black gang kids—“were seen in the vicinity between two and two-thirty, the approximate time of death. The only person seen leaving the building after two o’clock was a white male. He could have been any age between forty and sixty. He was wearing a beige all-weather coat and a beige hat.”

  “That only describes about half a million businessmen,” I said.

  “Nobody noticed anything unusual about him. The two people who saw him were on the upper floors of the building. They said he wasn’t real tall, but he didn’t seem real short, and he didn’t seem overweight or very thin, but it was hard to tell. They weren’t sure if his hair was light brown, dark blond, or gray. One said he looked ‘kinda average.’ The other said he looked like a lunch customer going back to work. He wasn’t running or doing anything suspicious. They didn’t know if Burt let him out, or if he opened the door himself.”

  I’d been sucking up the last of my shake with a straw and it made a loud slurp. I felt about twelve. I tried to recover by asking a grown-up question. “What about his car?”

  “Nobody saw it,” Mayhew said. “He turned right at the corner and walked up the hill. Must have been parked on a side street. I had some hope for the back of the building. A rooming house with a lot of retirees overlooks the back parking lot. Retirees are alert to anything unusual in their neighborhood.”

  “That’s for sure,” I said. “People used to complain about the nosy South Siders. Now, when the neighborhoods are changing, nosy neighbors are a built-in security system. If I had my choice between a pit bull and a retiree who watched everything, I’d take the retired person every time. Pit bulls won’t dial 911 when they see something suspicious.”

  “This time no one saw anything,” Mayhew said. “I think they would have noticed if someone was creeping around back there. Those teenagers make them nervous to begin with, and I don’t blame them. Some of those kids are more dangerous than the grownups. They don’t hesitate to kill. Did you see where that thirteen-year-old shot and killed that guy at the gas station on Tucker? The old people are always calling us if they see kids in gang clothes loitering near a car or a basement window. Besides, the old people in that building all liked Burt. He let a lot of them eat lunch on the tab until their monthly Social Security checks came in.”

  “So nobody saw anything.”

  “Yeah, that’s about it,” Mark said. He slurped his shake, too, so I didn’t feel so bad. I wondered if Clint Eastwood would consider a scene at a soda fountain with dueling straws. Mark put his empty shake glass aside, and reached for a package of crackers. He tore it open and crumbled the whole thing into his chili. The man’s stomach belonged in a medical museum.

  “What about fingerprints?”

  “Millions of those,” Mayhew said. “It’s a bar. But there were none on the weapon—it was wiped. Only Burt’s and Dolores’s fingerprints were on the cash register. The killer could have put prints all over the rest of the bar and it wouldn’t help us. There were too many.”

  “Any word on the street? Anyone bragging?”

  “Nothing there, either. Nothing anywhere. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to get ’em.”

  “What if it wasn’t a kid? What if it wasn’t a robbery? What if Burt was killed for some other reason besides money?”

  “Like what?” said Mark. “Who’d want to kill Burt?”

  “Maybe he knew something,” I said.

  “He knew lots of things. But he was careful, he never talked.”

  “He talked to me,” I said.

  “Francesca, I don’t want to bust your bubble. I know you admired Burt, but he wasn’t quite the cute old guy you thought he was. He was using you. He talked to you when he had a reason to.”

  I started to protest, but he held up his chili spoon. “Hear me out. Then you can argue with me. You were right about a lot of things. Burt was honest. He worked hard and he never stole anything. He didn’t take money, either. And he did help people, although generally he helped them so they’d give him information later. That’s what he traded in. Those scoops he gave you were things his pals in City Hall wanted leaked to the paper, to help nail someone they didn’t like. Remember when he told you about that black clerk who’d been embezzling parking ticket money?”

  “The clerk was guilty,” I said.

  “So he was,” said Mark. “But there are a lot of sticky-fingered clerks in City Hall, and most of them are still helping themselves. But that one was a threat to the white alderman in his increasingly black ward. The black clerk was getting ready to run against the white alderman in the next election, and there were now enough blacks in that ward so that he had a good chance of winning. The white alderman wanted him out of the way. So Burt planted that little tidbit with you, and you went after him.”

  I felt sick. I hated being used. “But the clerk was guilty,” I said. “The courts said he’d taken more than a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I never said he wasn’t. You got him, fair and square. You deserved the awards your story won. The clerk deserved to go to jail. That’s why I never said anything. I am saying this: Burt steered you to that particular clerk, and you never knew the reason. You wanted a kindly old grandfather so bad, you made Burt into one.”

  “How do you know Burt did that to me?”

  “I spent a lot of time in Burt’s Bar, sitting back by the ice machine. Nobody liked that booth. Too noisy and too close to the kitchen. Burt let me sit there and drink coffee because I was cheap security. He thought I’d scare off anyone thinking about holding up the place when it wasn’t crowded. It helped me, too. That corner was a natural listening booth. I could hear everything that was said at the bar. If the voices dropped to a whisper, I could hear even better. I’ve got ears like a bat anyway. I can tell you this. Burt was a shrewd old guy. I used to like to watch him. Some of his regulars would bring their wives in one night and their girl friends the next, and Burt never blinked an eye. He’d listen to the city politicians talk about who they were going to screw next and never say a word. He only told you what they wanted you to have passed on. I know for a fact he kept his mouth shut about some sleazy deals, because I heard them, too.”

  “Maybe one of those pols killed him.”

  “Give me a reason why.”

  “Burt knew something and this time he wouldn’t keep quiet.”

  “I doubt it. If you can tell me what it was, I might take you seriously. But right now, you’re just throwing out excuses.”

  I was getting mad. I didn’t want to believe his cynical appraisal of Burt. I wouldn’t believe it. “Burt was a good man,” I said.

  “I never said he wasn’t,” said Mark. “But he wasn’t naive.”

  “No, he wasn’t. My point exactly. He’d never let in some gang kid to hold him up. He was too sharp for that. I can’t believe Burt was killed in a robbery gone wrong. Besides, if it was a gang kid, someone would have seen him running from the building. You said Burt’s Bar was watched front and back, and no one saw anyone suspicious.”

  “They could have missed him,” Mayhew said. “It wasn’t watched by the Secret Service.”

  “Old people are better than the Secret Service,” I said.

  Mark was at his most irritating. He’d slipped into the cop attitude I hated most, the patronizing “you’re just a civilian who can’t understand us professionals.”

  “Francesca, the old people could have been at lunch. They could have been taking a nap. The office workers could have been on the phone or in a meeting. Burt was killed in a holdup. I can give you a motive—money. Give me a better one and I’ll believe you.”

  I didn’t have a better one. I
just knew there had to be one. I also knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere with Mark. Now he was trying to jolly me along. “Come on,” he said, smiling. “I could have told you this on the phone. Why did you ask me to lunch? It’s not just for my baby-brown eyes.” He waggled his eyebrows at me, Groucho style, but I was still ticked off. It’s a cop habit, accusing everyone else of being unworldly. And I didn’t like Mark’s picture of Burt as a schemer—or me as a gull. It was time to change the subject, before I lost my temper and a good source.

  “You know Ralph the Rehabber?”

  “I know a lot of rehabbers, but not one named Ralph.”

  “This one died of an asthma attack in a house on Utah. He was a friend of mine. Listen, there was something funny about his death. I think Ralph was murdered.”

  “What makes you think that?” said Mark, suddenly looking more interested. He was even leaning a little bit forward.

  “His inhaler was gone. He had really bad asthma and he never went anywhere without an inhaler. But there wasn’t one on his body, with his things, or in his truck. I searched the room. I searched his truck. I looked at his ladder. He kept a spare inhaler tied in a pouch on his ladder, but when I checked it out, the string was cut, and his inhaler was missing.”

  “So, he used it.”

  “No, he called that inhaler his medical insurance. He’d never do that. He’d replace it right away.”

  “Francesca, if this Ralph was like all the other rehabbers I know, he’d work with plaster dust and fast food bags and crap all around. Pardon my French, but how could you tell anything was missing? Those inhalers are pretty small. How can you be sure you didn’t overlook it?”

  “I searched the room pretty well. I know what the inhaler looks like. It’s bright yellow, so people can find it in a hurry. Here’s something else. Ralph’s truck was broken into.”

  “Where was the truck parked?”

  “McDonald, near Spring.”

  “He’s lucky the truck was still there at all.”