by Elaine Viets
“He’s not lucky. He’s dead,” I said flatly. “It was a strange break-in, too. His radio was untouched, but papers were scattered all over the truck.”
“Was anything missing?”
“Didn’t seem to be,” I admitted.
“Neighborhood must be getting better,” he said.
“You’re not taking me seriously.”
“No. I’m not. There’s nothing to take seriously. Burt was an old man with a bar in a neighborhood going bad. His wife and kids wanted him to retire, or at least move to a safe suburb, but Burt refused. He died in a stupid small-time robbery.”
“But the killer left the big money under the cash drawer,” I said.
“Maybe Burt wouldn’t tell him where he kept the big cash, and that’s why he got stabbed. Maybe the killer thought he had it all. It’s a small bar. We don’t know. These are animals. They’d kill for a pair of shoes or a leather jacket.
“As for your friend Ralph, he was taking out plaster ceilings and he had asthma. You know dust can trigger an asthma attack. He didn’t have an inhaler at hand, and it killed him. Period. No big plot. He was sick and he was working and the work was dangerous for his condition.” Mark was pounding the table with the handle of his chili spoon as he made each point.
“Someone took his inhaler,” I said.
“Who? Who? I hate sounding like an owl, Francesca, but name one person who would want to kill a guy like Ralph.”
“Well, he was gay. He hung out with drag queens.”
“This doesn’t sound like a homosexual killing,” Mark said, sounding a little impatient. “It sounds like he was pushing to get his work done on that ceiling, didn’t take the right precautions, and died. Face it. The man was a slob. He couldn’t find his inhaler when he needed it.”
“No. That’s not true. He was terrified of dying like that. He kept an inhaler with him, no matter what. He had another one tied to his ladder, because he knew dust was dangerous. Someone took his inhaler and that killed him. He was murdered, just as sure as if he’d been stabbed like Burt.”
Mark stopped for a moment, as if he were carefully organizing his thoughts. “Look,” he said. “We both know that you have an ugly murder in your past. But that doesn’t mean the death of everyone you know is murder. Burt and Ralph both died close together. It’s bound to affect you. Learn to accept your grief and your loss. Let them go. Stop making these useless inquiries. You can’t keep Burt and Ralph alive. They’re dead, Francesca.”
I didn’t need pop psychology from a cop who’d taken a night course at a community college. It was time to go. I left some money on the table.
“Thank you Dr. Freud,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Mark said. He looked contrite. “I’m just trying to give you some free advice.”
“Yeah, well, you know what they say about free advice,” I said. “You get what you pay for.”
I walked out of the Crown Candy Kitchen with as much dignity as I could muster. I was angry. I knew Burt and Ralph were both murdered. And I was going to prove it, if it was the last thing I did.
It very nearly was.
“DUNRIGHT DONE WRONG IN DOWNTOWN HOTEL: CAUGHT WITH PANTS DOWN—LITERALLY!”
I saw the gleeful Gazette headline as I passed the red newspaper coin box outside Uncle Bob’s Pancake House. My, my. Either Hadley’s smut ban went down with Dunright’s pants, or this story was so good it was beyond Mr. Morality’s restrictions. I bought a paper and took it to a booth. No doubt about it. This was too juicy for any editor, no matter how moral, to pass up.
David Dunright was a city official, the license manager. Normally, the LM was a cushy job for some friend of the mayor’s. All he did was supervise six clerks who’d been there for thirty years. The clerks did the work, issuing licenses for everything from tavern jukeboxes to restaurant refrigerators, from boardinghouses to hospitals. LMs made a salary of sixty thousand dollars a year. Some greedy LMs collected a little extra in graft on the side. The honest and/or ambitious ones went after businesses that avoided getting licenses and made them cough up their fees. A city official could get a lot of headlines that way. By the time the next election rolled around, an LM could be considered a serious crusader—and contender.
Dunright was the most ambitious license manager yet. He’d discovered a section in the city ordinance that said licenses could not be issued to “immoral businesses.” That was the nineteenth-century way of ensuring that whorehouses couldn’t be licensed. Dunright put a twentieth-century spin on it. He interpreted “immoral businesses” to mean video stores selling risqué tapes. He began raiding any store selling X-rated tapes. He busted them under the city porn laws and then revoked their licenses. Soon Dunright was all over TV, radio, and the CG, spouting about how city stores were not going to rent pornography to children. No store was ever busted for renting X-rated tapes to children, nor did any parent ever complain that their child came home with a rented porn tape. It didn’t matter. It might happen. Dunright’s simple-minded statements appealed to a certain kind of moral minority, the ones interested in your morals, not theirs. The Gazette managing editor, Hadley Harris, couldn’t decide whether to come out for public morality or freedom of the press. In the end Hadley did remember that newspapers were supposed to support the Bill of Rights. It was close, though.
Any citizen who protested that Dunright was interfering in areas that were none of his business had to listen to a lecture about public morality. Dunright began giving TV interviews with this sound bite: “The city will not license licentiousness. With Dunright, it will be done right.” Sounded like a campaign slogan to me.
Dunright kept up the raids on the video stores. He never arrested the owners. They were often corporate entities in distant cities, and their high-priced attorneys would never let Dunright haul them off before blazing TV cameras. Instead, he went after the hapless clerks on duty. His last raid was after an undercover agent rented Goat Busters. Dunright bagged a student working his way through Forest Park Community College and a single mother with two kids. Nice work, Dunright.
But now Dunright himself had been caught, and now he was evading the reporters’ questions and avoiding the microphones and the glaring TV lights. Dunright had done wrong, indeed. At least for a man who set himself up to monitor everyone else’s morals. He’d picked up a prostitute at a city hotel who turned out to be a vice squad officer. He’d been attracted to her magnificent endowment. It had been well wired, and I’m not talking about her WonderBra. Better yet, the money he’d offered her was alleged to come from city funds. Maybe Dunright could say he was doing undercover work. He was about to go under the covers when he got caught.
It wasn’t often I got to feel morally superior to anyone, since I was semi-living in sin with my significant other, but Dunright was so good—or bad—that even I could take a swipe at him. I began planning the column in my head, when Marlene came over with more coffee and an even better column. This is why I loved Uncle Bob’s and made it my unofficial office. Things happened there. I knew a lot of city officials ate at the pancake place. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Marlene said, “Don’t look now, but Dunright is in the back room.”
“With or without his pants?”
“He’s got his pants, but I think he’s going to lose his shirt,” she said, pouring coffee as she talked. She didn’t spill a drop. “He’s been meeting with the city attorney’s office for the last two hours. They’re sitting back there talking and taking phone calls on a portable phone.” The city attorneys often used the back room for informal meetings. During the week, the back room was usually empty, so they could talk about sensitive matters without being overheard by gossips at their office. Of course, the waitresses picked up a few things while they poured and put down plates piled with waffles and eggs. Marlene certainly did.
She reported the scene with Dunright. “At first, everybody was real buddy-buddy. Sharky, the city attorney, sat down next to Dunright and advised him t
hat if he’d keep his mouth shut, he’d probably get through this okay. The yuppie lawyers in Sharky’s entourage were laughing and making jokes about it. Then the calls started coming in. Sharky looked more and more serious each time he answered his briefcase. The yuppie lawyers quit cracking jokes. Sharky took his last call in the men’s john ten minutes ago. When he came back, he didn’t sit next to Dunright. He sat across from him. I couldn’t hear exactly what was said, but I heard ‘resign’ and ‘leave of absence’ at least twice. There’s supposed to be a press conference tomorrow afternoon. The yuppie lawyers wouldn’t even look at Dunright. I think Dunright is done for.”
This was a tip worth checking out. I could have hugged Marlene, but it would have caused talk. Instead, I would leave an exorbitant tip, which was easy to do when your breakfast was three bucks. “Good,” I said. “I’m glad they got him. We’ve got drug dealers on the street corners, and he’s wasting city money busting video store clerks.”
“Buying hookers with my tax dollars too,” said Marlene. “That makes me real happy.”
“Are they still back there?”
“Yep, but not for long. The guys asked for the check and they’re getting their coats.”
“Fine. I’ll give them an hour to settle into City Hall, then give Sharky a call. Dunright’s being dumped—couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
Dunright’s downfall didn’t surprise me. But I was glad to have the inside scoop. Marlene was my always reliable source. She was a master at picking up stray facts and interpreting body language and a shrewd judge of people. Once, I praised her to a business owner who ate at Uncle Bob’s. He said, “If she’s so smart, why isn’t she rich?” I stared at the guy. At first, I thought he was joking. Then I realized he meant it. He really believed that rich people were smarter. And this was from a man who’d made one smart move in his life: He’d chosen the right parents. His mother and father were loaded, and had the decency to die when he was in his twenties. I’d like to see how smart he would be if he found himself in Marlene’s white nurse’s shoes. Her husband walked out on her when their daughter was a toddler, and she had no trust fund to keep her going.
Unfortunately, a lot of men had the same attitude about Marlene: If she’s so smart, why isn’t she rich? If she’s hauling around plates and coffeepots, and I’m carrying a briefcase, then I don’t have to take her seriously. So they didn’t. They were rude to her because they could be. They didn’t tip because they didn’t think she was important. Which meant Marlene reported their more interesting conversations to me. Since none of these men ever noticed Marlene in the first place, they never figured out where my information came from. They’d turn the office upside down looking for the spy, and never realize they’d spilled the beans on themselves at breakfast.
“When’s your break?” I asked Marlene.
“Ten minutes,” she said.
“Got time to talk to me? I have something I want to run past you.”
“Sure.” Before she could say more, I heard a loud voice yelling, “Marlene, get over here. This coffee tastes like crap!”
“Oh, God, is this week over yet?” said Marlene. She went to the Bunn coffee machine, poured a fresh cup, and hurried off to a table with two gray-haired men in suits. I watched her talking and laughing with them. Then she spent the next ten minutes hustling plates, taking orders, and pouring coffee. Finally, she poured herself a cup and sat down in my booth with a sigh. “I’ve had some weird ones lately,” she said. “It happens every time we get a warm spell in late winter.”
The temperature the last few days had shot up to seventy degrees. Some of the early spring flowers were starting to send up green shoots. Nobody was fooled except a couple of crocuses. When the wind blew, the winter cold was there, like shark fins slicing through a warm ocean. Winter would be back in a day or two. In the meantime, this premature taste of spring made us all a little crazy.
“I worked the late shift last night,” Marlene said. “In comes one of my regulars, a quiet woman who always orders coffee and a double stack. She usually wears a nice pantsuit. Last night she came in wearing a red shortie nightie with a live boa constrictor around her neck.”
“I thought boas were out of style,” I said.
“You can laugh. You’ve never faced a snake with little beady eyes,” Marlene said.
“I have too. I was in Hadley’s office this week. What did you do with the Snake Woman?”
“I told her we couldn’t serve snakes after midnight, and she left.”
I laughed. Marlene could handle anything, including fights on the parking lot. “You had something you wanted to run past me,” she said.
“I think my friend Ralph and Burt the bartender were murdered.”
Marlene raised one eyebrow, and her cheerful face looked grave. I told her what I knew about Burt’s death, and how Homicide Detective Mark Mayhew thought the motive was robbery, but I didn’t. “The killer took about two hundred dollars, but left seven hundred dollars in the register, under the cash drawer. The police say it was probably one of the neighborhood gang kids who either got scared off and left the money or didn’t know where to look for the rest of it.”
“They know where to look,” said Marlene flatly.
“Anyway, no kids were seen near the building at that time, and there were people in the rooming house behind it and the office across the street from Burt’s Bar. The police also say Burt probably let his killer in, but Burt was always careful.”
“Yeah,” said Marlene, “but I know a lot of restaurant owners who were careful, and wound up dead anyway. Remember Preslee’s?”
“Who doesn’t? I still miss Preslee’s steaks. You’d think a steakhouse next to a police station would be safe,” I said.
“Preslee certainly did. He was the most careful restaurant owner I knew. He courted the cops,” Marlene said. “Fed them royally. On steak, yet. You couldn’t eat there without stumbling over two or three cops. Used to make me nervous, personally, surrounded by all those police officers. I always felt they could see that roach in the bottom of my purse. But they made Preslee feel safe. Still didn’t help him. He died in his own restaurant, stabbed to death with a kitchen knife after he chastised a busboy for not cleaning off a table. It happened after hours, when all the steak-fed cops were gone.”
“They did catch his killer quickly, though,” I said. “I always wondered if the cops felt guilty.”
“They had a steak in solving the murder,” said Marlene.
I groaned.
“Okay, I see what you’re getting at,” I said. “But what about Ralph’s death? Ralph was absolutely paranoid about being caught without his inhaler. He always carried one in his pocket. He even kept an inhaler in a pouch on his ladder. But when he died, they didn’t find one in the room where he was working, and the one on his ladder was cut. So explain that one.”
“Easy,” Marlene said. “You said he was so sick and groggy, he could hardly talk. I could see him forgetting his inhaler, using the one on his ladder and then forgetting to replace it. You do dumb things when you’re sick. And, Francesca, you said that man was sick.”
“He was also afraid. He was afraid of dying just the way he did.”
“There’s a reason why people have those fears. I’ve always believed they’re slightly psychic. On some level, they know how they’re going to die. I can give you several examples, but the most dramatic was Mrs. Ames. She was a regular customer who was afraid of flying. Went on and on about how she was going to die in a plane crash, every time she had to fly. I used to razz her. We all did. I even gave her a magazine article saying air travel is safer than car travel. Didn’t convince Mrs. Ames. She said it didn’t make any difference how good the statistics were—if you were on the wrong side of them, you were still dead. She died in that Florida crash. I thought her epitaph should have been ‘I told you so.’ ”
I laughed. Marlene didn’t believe me any more than Detective Mark Mayhew did, but at least she listened. She d
idn’t try to psychoanalyze me. “You haven’t said anything yet to convince me that their deaths were anything but what the cops said. Mark is in here all the time. He isn’t just any cop. He’s a good one. He’s solved some big cases, like the murder of that little girl. He can be arrogant, but he has a good heart, a good head, and a cute tush.”
“For shame, treating men as sex objects.”
“Okay, I’ll get serious,” Marlene said. “You asked for my opinion, and this is it: People die of asthma all the time. Single people don’t take care of themselves as well as married people, and they don’t live as long. It’s a fact. It’s also a fact that bartenders get killed in holdups, and not just city bartenders. I can name you at least three I know who died, and one worked at a high-priced place in the county. But I promise you I’ll keep my mind open. My eyes too.”
“Good. You have a lot to see here. Everyone eats at Uncle Bob’s, especially if they keep late hours.”
“Tell me about it. Last night, besides the Snake Woman, we had the chief of police and the mayor’s press assistant—but not together—two known drug dealers, three cops, and several lowlifes with homemade LOVE and HATE tattoos on their hands. Speaking of lowlifes, even some of the Gazette staff are starting to eat here, I mean besides you, and they are lousy tippers, especially your editor.”
Figured. Hadley was better at hanging on to his money than his girl friends.
“Oh, God, look who just walked in,” said Marlene.
It was the Gazette gossip columnist, Babe Currane, known as Babe because he greets everyone with “Hiya, babe, whatcha got for me?” Babe scanned the room for important people. His eyes flicked over Marlene. All he could see of me was the back of my head, and with any luck he couldn’t see that. Babe sat two booths away, in back of a skinhead with a KISS T-shirt. He ordered blueberry pancakes with extra whipped cream.
“How come he eats like that and never gains an ounce?” said Marlene. “Babe is so skinny and sad, he looks like an undertaker.”
