Backstab

by Elaine Viets

  “I know,” he said modestly.

  The murderer confessed the next morning. It was the Aryan Avenger. I found the letter in the mail on my desk, along with a circular for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. He claimed he’d killed Ralph and Burt both.

  I’d always dismissed his mindless drivel. He sent me letter after letter after Burt died, and I’d tossed them all in my Weirdo file. His cretinous brain could only hold one thought: Burt was Jewish. It was so stupid and so wrong, I’d simply ignored his primitive poetry that oozed malice like an open sore. Not this time. Not after this letter.

  It even looked lethal. The lame verses and limping meters seemed murderous. The swastikas were big and black and dripping blood. The SS lightning bolts slashed down the paper like saws. The block printing had degenerated into black spikes, driven into the blue-lined paper. For once I read every rambling word. The six suppurating lines were addressed to “Francesca, the Liberal Bitch”

  What’s better than two hundred dollars?

  Making the JewBurt holler.

  And my final solution for a filthy fag?

  Breathless death. Choke and gag.

  Beautiful to see. You’ll thank me.

  Lightning white Justice makes the Christian free.

  Burt’s killer took two hundred dollars from the register, but that number was never in the news. The police held back that information in their interviews with the press and I didn’t print it. It could help identify Burt’s killer. But the Aryan Avenger knew exactly how much had been taken. And that wasn’t all he knew.

  There were no newspaper stories about Ralph’s death, just a brief obituary notice that didn’t say how he died. So how did the Avenger know that Ralph had had a “breathless death,” choking and gagging? Unless he’d been there to see it. Did he take Ralph’s inhalers and watch him die? Did he stab Burt with Dolores’s butcher knife? Did he kill two men for some crazy, bigoted reason? What else was in his letters?

  I got out my Weirdo file and pawed through the folder for the Aryan Avenger letters. From the postmarks, they started right after Burt’s death. They were easy to pick out. The envelopes were covered with lightning bolts and swastikas. Reading them caused major mind pollution. No wonder I tossed them in the file without finishing them. Most of the Avenger’s verses were anti-Semitic insults with rhymes like “dirty Jew” and “hate you.” T. S. Eliot needn’t worry that this St. Louisan was after his poetry title. The Avenger also sprinkled his work liberally (no, that’s the wrong word) with insults for other minority groups: gays, Asians, African Americans, and “women’s libbers.”

  Otherwise, there was nothing to distinguish the Avenger from any other prejudiced pervert in the file. I looked through the stack. Most letters were block-printed and had a lot of underlinings. Some were in pencil. One was in orange crayon. My favorite nut letter was from the guy at the Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It began, “Dear Francesca: I saw you on TV and you’re not too fat. I would like to marry you but the doctors say I can never touch another woman again.” He planned to ignore his doctor’s advice and marry me as soon as he got out. Then he sent me a poem he’d written—“Darkness and Blackness and Very Bad Smells”—that made me grab the phone and ask the hospital director if the nuptials were anytime soon.

  “Oh, dear,” said the director. “He’s been writing letters during recreation again.”

  “Anything you can do to curtail his fun? This boy sounds scary,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said the director. “He won’t be getting out for a very long time. He writes letters to the President, too. The Secret Service watches him very closely.”

  I hoped he wouldn’t get red Jell-O for dessert for a week after the letter he wrote me.

  I knew I had at least one more Aryan Avenger letter in the file. Ah, there it was, stuck on the back of a “Dear Dumb Bitch” letter in black furry ink. The writing looked like a spider had crawled over the page. This was the coffee-stained Aryan Avenger poem from the day Ralph died. I’d never gotten past the snappy opening. It began:

  “Dear Whore of the CG: You liberal bitches are all alike….” The ink had smeared, but I could still read the rest of his epic:

  Imagine a world with no more fags and kikes.

  Won’t it be Grand?

  No, it will be by Klocke!

  That poem made even less sense than the others. Was it just Nazi nonsense, or did “by Klocke” mean something? Maybe it was German for “by crackey.” It nagged at me. Klocke sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn’t know what it meant. For all my German heritage, I didn’t speak a word of the language. Well, a few cusswords, but that’s about it. I wasn’t allowed to learn German. I wanted to take it in high school, but my grandparents believed in the melting pot. “You’re an American, speak English,” they said. “You don’t need to know how they talk in the old country.” In the sixties, German was still the language of the vanquished enemy, and there was no reason to speak it. Ethnicity, especially German ethnicity, was not particularly prized.

  Marlene, the waitress at Uncle Bob’s, knew a little German. One of her Irish uncles had married a second-generation German, and Aunt Gertrude taught her some of the language. I grabbed the letters and hit Uncle Bob’s at eleven thirty, just before the lunchtime rush. I was going to have a scrambled egg twice in one day. There was no point in thinking about ordering anything else. Tom the Cook saw my car pull into the lot and dropped my egg on the grill. Marlene brought it out by the time I got to my booth.

  “Couldn’t stay away from us,” said Marlene. “Nobody scrambles an egg like Uncle Bob’s. McDonald’s offered us a million dollars for our secret recipe, but we refused to give it up.”

  “I like the food,” I said. “But I really come here for the conversation. When I need to be taken down a notch, I go to Uncle Bob’s.”

  “Must need it a lot,” said Marlene. “You’re in here all the time.”

  I showed her the smeary, coffee-soaked Aryan Avenger letter. It was the color of a paper grocery bag. “Do you want me to boil this and pour it for you?” she said.

  “I want you to read it and analyze it,” I said. “What do you make of this letter?”

  I told Marlene the story and said I was looking for some hint as to where I could find this anonymous Aryan Avenger. “This section here bothers me,” I said. “Why does that K-word look familiar?”

  Marlene studied the crude couplet:

  Won’t it be Grand?

  No, it will be by Klocke!

  “Klocke is a South St. Louis street,” she said, pronouncing it “Clock-key.”

  “That’s right. It is. A short street right off Grand Boulevard. Between Merb’s Candy and Giuseppe’s Restaurant.”

  No true St. Louisan gives an address when she can name a landmark. And maybe that’s what that crazy phrase was: a way to locate Klocke Street, off Grand. I suspected the Aryan Avenger was a South St. Louisan. Klocke wasn’t a street most people from any other neighborhood would ever find—or go looking for. You had to be there.

  “It’s a good place to start looking for the Aryan Avenger,” I said.

  “What if you find him?” Marlene said. “I’ve seen some of those neo-Nazis in the restaurant. They’re scary looking. Remember the kid with the shaved head and the swastikas on his hands the day Babe was in here? Did you see his muscles? Did you notice his boots? What if he’s your killer? Do you think you can go up against someone like that?”

  “If it was a fashion showdown, a DKNY pantsuit beats an old KISS T-shirt any day,” I said.

  Marlene didn’t seem impressed. “I think you should tell your cop friend, Mark Mayhew,” she said. “The police keep tabs on those hate group guys.”

  “I’m not going to have Mark tell me I’m crazy again. If the Aryan Avenger turns out to be a harmless nutcase, I’ll have wasted Mark’s time and confirmed his suspicions about me. Besides, I haven’t found the Avenger yet.”

  “What are you going to do? Walk down Klocke, l
isten for which house has Wagner blasting, and bust down the door?”

  “You saw that movie, too,” I said. “If it is the guy in the KISS T-shirt, I don’t think I’ll hear the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ playing.”

  I went back to work and finished writing my column. It was three thirty by the time I hit the button and sent it into the oosphere. There was still time to check out Klocke Street. I grabbed my coat. The elevator doors opened just as I pressed the button. What luck. Uh-oh. The managing editor, Hadley Harris the Third, stepped into the elevator as the doors were closing. I always felt uncomfortable with that man. Being caged in an elevator with him was torture. Slow torture. CG elevators shuddered and bumped down every floor, as if they were lowered by a hand with a rope. If I was lucky, Hadley would be in a grumpy mood, give me a curt nod and ignore me. Unfortunately, today he was going for jovial. “Well, Francesca,” he said, “are you sneaking out early, ha-ha?” He spoke with that phony-friendly headmaster’s voice.

  “I’m tracking down someone in deepest South St. Louis,” I said. “On Klocke. A little street you’ve probably never heard of, but I hope it will be a good story and…” And I was babbling and the light indicated we had two more floors to go. At last, we landed. “Good-bye, Francesca,” Hadley said.

  “Have a nice day,” I said—probably the dippiest good-bye in the language. The fact that I used it showed how rattled I was. Hadley smiled and went out the back door to his executive parking spot. I went out the front to the peons’ lot. I took a deep breath. The smog, underlined with that faint beery smell, was a reviver. So was the sunny, chilly air. The unseasonably warm temperatures were gone, and the crisp cold weather made you want to go for a brisk walk. It was a good day to visit South St. Louis. I drove south on Grand. Klocke was a one-way street emptying out on Grand, and getting to it was tricky. I parked my car on Klocke and started walking. I had no idea what I would find. I just wanted to look.

  The people who lived on Klocke were starting to come home from work. I saw tired-looking men in tan or blue coveralls and women in plain cloth coats made to last several seasons. This was not a street where lawyers and accountants stayed late at the office. There were no Beemers or Mercedeses in front of the houses, and nobody went out for sixty-dollar expense account lunches. People on Klocke worked hard at the plant or the office, paid their bills, and took one vacation a year, in the Ozarks.

  The houses were mostly two-bedroom brick bungalows, neat homes with small pointed-roofed porches and little slanted square lawns with steep concrete steps and metal-pipe handrails. The lawns had concrete ornaments and yellow plastic sunflowers. The trim was painted either white or green and most of the paint was fresh. So were the black SS lightning bolts next to the mailbox of the house just past the middle of the block.

  Lightning bolts?

  I stopped dead on the sidewalk and stared.

  A long brass mailbox was bolted beside the front door, precisely even with the door knob. On either side of the box were black SS lightning bolts. They looked like the ones on the Aryan Avenger letters. I pulled the Avenger letters out of my purse and checked. The lightning bolts sure seemed similar, at least to me, standing down here on the street. I climbed the narrow concrete steps to the porch. Definitely the same lightning bolts.

  The house was as well-kept as its neighbors. The back porch had a well-crafted wheelchair ramp, painted white. The front porch was white, too. So was the birdbath. The gutters were forest green. The steps were painted battleship gray. These were the classic South Side colors. A traditionalist lived here.

  I rang the doorbell, and a man about forty-five answered it. He looked like he needed to sleep for a week. His black hair was thin. His hips were wide. His brown sweater was shapeless and pilled, and made his face look yellow. His shoulders slumped, emphasizing a small round potbelly. His Hush Puppies looked like they should have been put to sleep. I bet he didn’t know they were back in style. I felt tired and defeated just looking at the guy.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  Might as well try the shock approach. “Hi. I’m looking for the Aryan Avenger,” I said brightly. He backed up like I’d kicked him in the gut, then turned pale and blurted, “It’s not me.”

  “He’s here,” I said sternly, looking him in the eye and willing him to obey. Francesca, She-Wolf of the SS.

  “No! N-nobody here,” he stuttered, and tried to shut the door. I must have been a vacuum cleaner salesperson in a past life. I stuck my size 11 foot in the door, and the rest of me naturally followed. I was six inches taller than this guy, and he looked timid and out of shape. I found myself standing in a tiny living room with a huge brown plaid couch, a brown recliner, and a boxy brown TV. The TV was on. The coffee table was piled with magazines and paperbacks showing swastikas and guys in brown uniforms. I was in the right place.

  “Frank! Get in here!” said a man with a commanding voice. I followed the big voice down a little hall. Frank ran after me, crying, “You can’t go in there!”

  I went. The Aryan Avenger was in the room at the end of the hall. The walls were decorated with homemade swastikas and SS lightning bolts and a faded Nazi flag that looked like some GI’s war souvenir. A portable toilet under the flag spoiled the effect.

  The Aryan Avenger was sitting in a shiny metal wheelchair. He had to be at least eighty. His pale, papery skin was veined and speckled and hung from his arms and neck like old wrinkled rags. His bushy eyebrows were still mostly black, but his hair was yellowish white, like old pillow feathers. At one time, he must have been a big man, well over six feet tall. Now he was shrunken and stoop-shouldered. There was no way this guy could have killed Burt or Ralph. He could barely push himself around the room. He grasped the rubber-edged chair wheels and rolled over to me. “Who are you?” he demanded in a loud, angry voice.

  “I’m Francesca. Why are you sending me those disgusting Aryan Avenger letters?”

  “You got them?” He seemed pleased. Every author wants recognition.

  “Yeah, I got them. What I don’t understand is why you sent them.”

  “Why, to warn you, my dear,” he said. His face took on a crafty look, like a sly parrot.

  “About what?”

  “The Jews. The Jews did this to me. They crippled me. People need to know.” Yuck. The p in “people” set off a spray of spit at my belt level. I could see spit spots on my coat.

  “What’s that got to do with Ralph and Burt’s deaths?”

  “I read about JewBurt in your story in the paper,” he said. “I didn’t cry when JewBurt died.”

  “If you really read the paper, you’d know that Burt was buried out of St. Philomena’s. Not many Jewish people are buried from a Catholic church.”

  He looked abashed. “Oh. I didn’t read your article all the way to the end,” he said. “It was kind of long.”

  Everyone’s a critic.

  “How did you know that two hundred dollars was taken from the till? That information wasn’t published.”

  “Perfect poet inspiration,” he said. The triple p’s turned on the shower. I was in danger of drowning from the Aryan Avenger.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I needed to find a rhyme for ‘holler.’ Holler—two hundred dollars. That’s all.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then explain how you knew Ralph choked to death?”

  “Who’s Ralph?” he said, and suddenly looked lost, like I’d slipped in a question that wasn’t supposed to be on the test.

  “Ralph was my friend, and he had asthma and he couldn’t breathe because someone took his inhalers and he died.”

  “But what’s that got to do with me?” he whined. Then his eyes brightened with malice. “He’s a fag, isn’t he? I also warned you about fags in my letters, especially the last letter. But I didn’t mean just your fag should choke and gag. I meant all fags. I had fag nurses in the hospital. Snippy, they were. I wanted them all to choke on…I can’t say what exactly in front of a lady. But I wanted them to c
hoke because of the filthy things they do with their mouths.”

  “Nothing’s filthier than your hate mail,” I said. “And you didn’t mind saying those things on paper. Why are you writing that disgusting stuff?”

  “I have reason to hate the Jews. If it wasn’t for them, I’d be walking. Dirty, filthy, stupid Jews did this to me. Look at that goddamned portable toilet. I can’t even stand up like a man and take a piss!” Another P-word. Another spit shower. He got me again. Spit happens.

  “I’m not too pleased with the sit-down plumbing problem myself,” I said, hoping I got him back with a little spray. “But you have no reason to say those ugly things, or claim you killed Burt. You didn’t. You couldn’t.”

  “I know,” he said. “I can’t even leave the house. I can’t even take a crap without being lifted out of this chair. I can’t do anything anymore. I’m useless. Useless. Useless. I can’t even die and I want to so bad.” His rage turned to tears, then to harsh, racking sobs.

  Frank, who’d been lurking slump-shouldered at the door, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of the room. He shut the door and started chewing me out in a harsh, low voice. “Now look what you’ve done,” he said between clenched teeth. “You’ve upset him.”

  “I’ve upset him? Listen, Bud…”

  “Frank,” he hissed.

  “Listen, Frank. Your father sent me that ugly antigay, anti-Semitic slop through the mail. He threatened me, too.”

  “You’re strong,” Frank whined, while he picked fuzzballs off his sweater. “You can stand it. You don’t have to live with him, day in and day out. I have no life. All my money goes for a sitter to watch him when I’m at work. She leaves at three thirty, and I have to come straight home from the plant to stay with him. I don’t sleep through the night because he calls me to help him every time he has to go to the john. Maybe the letters aren’t very nice, but they keep him quiet for hours. He loves to write the poems and color in the drawings.”