Backstab

by Elaine Viets

  “Arrrggaahhh,” he said, a strange gurgling scream. He pressed on the shelves, but his strength was gone. The wheel slipped a few times because of the blood, but I kept turning and the shelves kept moving together. When Hadley couldn’t move anymore, I jammed Fred’s metal ruler in the wheel so the shelves would stay. Hadley had stopped screaming. Now there was only silence. I grabbed a phone off a small desk back by the rolling files, where the staff looked at old clips. The phone slipped out of my bloody hand. I grabbed it again and dialed 911.

  “Help,” I said, surprised it came out as a whisper. “I’m in the morgue and someone’s trying to kill me.”

  “We don’t have time for jokes, lady, and prank calls are against the law,” said the person who answered.

  I finally convinced her I was Francesca Vierling, calling from the reference library of the City Gazette, and I’d been attacked and slashed by a white male assailant. I was afraid to give out Hadley’s name. She’d never believe me.

  “Are you injured?” asked the operator, I suspect to keep me on the line.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been cut on my head, and my hand and my arm, and there’s a lot of blood.”

  A pool of it collected on the white Formica desktop and spilled over the edge. I watched the blood fall on the white floor tile. It sounded like rain. The room grew black around the edges and I passed out. The last thing I saw was my blood, dripping, dripping, dripping.

  By the time the police showed up at the City Gazette, I’d come to. It took them a few extra minutes to get upstairs because Jake, the night guard, thought the call was a prank, since nobody in the newsroom had called him about trouble in the morgue. The cops agreed, but said they’d better check it out anyway. Jake took them upstairs. Just about the time Jake and the cops arrived at the morgue, Fred came back from lunch. He took one look at the blood on Hadley and me and promptly lost his lunch, adding to the general disorder of the Gazette morgue.

  After that, things got a bit hazy. I told the police what happened, but it wasn’t easy. There were reporters all over, messing up the crime scene. Plus, once they realized who was trapped in the rolling files, a lot of police brass and high-ranking Gazette management showed up. I have no idea how long it took for an ambulance to cart me off to the hospital.

  Lyle was the first person to visit me in the hospital. He found me on a gurney in the emergency room. “You look like hell,” he said.

  “Thanks, I needed that,” I said.

  “Oh, god, baby, don’t ever do that again,” he said, scooping me up in his arms. I felt so romantic and so cold. My hospital gown parted in the back, exposing my bruised rear end to the hall traffic. A nurse broke off this touching scene. “Put her down,” she said to Lyle. “I don’t want anything disturbing those stitches.”

  I felt pretty good, actually, between Lyle and the drugs. Legal drugs beat the street stuff any day. The nurse, a human pit bull, sent Lyle home after we got in a few more kisses.

  When I woke up the next morning, I felt a lot worse. The last time I’d had a headache like that, I was twenty-one and had been drinking green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. My head pounded. My arm throbbed and my hand ached.

  At least I had something to look at besides bandages and bruises. Lyle had sent the most gorgeous peach roses. My first visitor that morning was Cutup Katie. The nurse, who’d been shooing curious fans out of the room, didn’t dare chase away Katie. She knew from the white coat that Katie was a doctor, and she retired respectfully into the hall. Katie wore a clean white coat, too. I was honored.

  “Hah. She wouldn’t leave me alone if she knew all your patients were dead,” I said.

  “I like it that way,” Katie said. “Cuts my malpractice insurance. Let’s see what Hadley did to you. I saw you being carried out of the Gazette on TV and you had blood all over. But I figured anyone who could ham it up for the TV cameras had to be okay.”

  “I fainted when no one was around,” I said.

  “Good,” said Katie. “I’d hate to have you wimp out in public.”

  I showed her where they shaved my head and gave me sixteen stitches in my scalp. “I’m going to have to comb my hair sideways over my bald patch for months. I’ll never make fun of drapeheads again.”

  “Hope you got a tetanus shot for that hole in your hand. Nice long scratch on your arm, too. That’s a classic defense wound. What was Hadley going for?”

  “My eye.”

  “Straight into the brain. That’s what I’d do, too,” said Katie, admiringly.

  “I wish you didn’t sound so approving.”

  “You’re fine,” said Katie. “Look, I hear he’s hired some tricky lawyer. There’s no chance he’ll get away with this?”

  “Over my dead body,” I said, and wished I hadn’t.

  Detective Mark Mayhew was my next visitor, a dazzling display of different shades of blue, from medium to dark. He showed up after they brought me back from X-Ray. I’d changed the hospital gown, which was designed by Frederick’s of Festus, for one of my own. I was sitting up in bed, trying to look like an ethereal vision in pale peach satin. It worked pretty well, if you didn’t count the big stupid white bandage on my bald spot where Hadley hit me. Lyle’s peach roses added to the otherworldly impression. That impression vanished when the nurse poked her head in and said, “Have you had a bowel movement today?”

  I told her that was classified information.

  “It’s not funny,” she said. “We need to know if your system is functioning properly.”

  “It’s functioning, it’s functioning. Jeez. Elizabeth Barrett Browning never had these problems.”

  Mark laughed, then chewed me out for going after a triple murderer on my own.

  “I didn’t know Hadley was a murderer. I thought it was Charlie.”

  But Mark wasn’t too mad. Not when he’d cleared three murders. With the lecture out of the way, he gave me the lowdown on Hadley. His scissors stab and head wound had bled like hell, and he was bruised from being trapped in the rolling files, but aside from that Hadley was in good shape.

  When the police released Hadley from the rolling files, they must have loosened his tongue. “The man couldn’t stop babbling,” Mark said. “He refused any legal representation. I managed to Miranda-ize him before he got to the good stuff. By the time the City Gazette lawyers got there and told him to shut up, Hadley had confessed to everything, and he kept talking.”

  “Nobody tells Hadley Harrison the Third to shut up, especially not a rented mouthpiece,” I said. “If he wanted to talk, he’d talk.”

  And the police listened to every word.

  “Hadley said he went out with Maria Callous, a.k.a. Michael Delmer, once or twice,” Mark continued. “ ‘It was not what people thought,’ he said, looking like an Episcopal bishop. ‘We never slept together.’ And they didn’t. She just gave him head in a downtown hotel room.”

  “Let me guess—the Riverside Inn,” I said, remembering my close encounter with Hadley and Miss Mouse, the consumer-reporter-to-be, on the seventeenth floor.

  “Correct. We found the credit card receipts. Also, Hadley put these encounters on his expense account—as a business lunch.”

  “No comment,” I said.

  “Anyway, after a few late-night lunches, Hadley saw Maria was getting serious about him, so he dumped her. Hadley didn’t put it in quite those words. He says he told Maria, ‘It would be better if we parted before things became too complicated, my lovely Maria. After all, I am a married man, and my first duty is to my dear wife.’ ”

  “That sounds like him,” I said.

  “Maria offered to be Hadley’s mistress, if he’d set her up in a house on the South Side. Hadley laughed at her and said she wasn’t good enough. Maria said she’d tell everyone Hadley had been having an affair with her. Hadley said to go ahead. He’d heard that threat before from other women. Who would believe a nobody like her?

  “That did it. Maria said he may have heard it from a woman, but no
t from a man. Maria told Hadley that she was actually a he—and she’d tell the whole city that Mr. Morality had been dating a man. Then to prove this was no cock-and-balls story she lifted up her skirt.

  “Hadley was stunned. He reacted by strangling Maria with her own scarf. She spent her last breath begging and threatening. She told Hadley that Burt and Ralph knew about their affair and would make the details public if she died. The best we can determine, they didn’t know a thing. Ralph and Burt were the last two men she saw at the bar that night with Hadley, and theirs were probably the only names that registered in Maria’s poor oxygen-starved brain.

  “Hadley insisted that killing Maria was a perfectly calm and rational decision. ‘I did it to preserve Family Values,’ he said. ‘Then I dumped her like the trash she was.’ ”

  “Adding littering to his other offenses,” I said.

  “You reporters are so cynical. Hadley had no explanation for why he sliced and diced Maria’s genitals with his pocket knife. He threw the bloody pocket knife and clothes away in his trash can at home. The trash was picked up the next morning. They’re probably six feet deep in a landfill by now. But he forgot two things. His shoes and his alligator watchband. We found blood on both, and it matches Maria’s.

  “The next day, he bought a new Swiss Army knife on his way in to work. Told us he got one of the big ones, with the miniature can opener. Can you believe it? Like he was proud of his purchase.

  “Hadley thought Maria might be lying about Burt and Ralph, but he had to know. He came into Burt’s Bar alone at lunchtime. He saw Ralph and Burt talking together and got scared. We interviewed a customer who was sitting at the bar when Ralph was in. The customer heard what Ralph said to Burt. Ralph ordered chicken soup to go and then asked Burt for extra crackers. But Hadley didn’t know that. He’d seen Ralph in the bar before, the night Hadley was there with Maria. He thought they were plotting against him.

  “Ralph paid for his soup and left. Because Hadley was sitting alone, Burt thought it was safe to mention Maria. After all, Hadley had introduced Maria to Burt the last time he was in, which is usually a signal the gentleman will talk about his date. ‘That sure was a pretty blonde you had with you,’ Burt said.”

  “Poor Burt, he pronounced his own death sentence.”

  “Yep,” said Mark. “Hadley took those words as a veiled threat.”

  “So he killed Burt after the lunch hour?”

  “He sat there and drank coffee, waiting until he was the last one in the bar. Then he asked Burt for Ralph the Rehabber’s phone number. Said he had some work for him. Burt wrote the number down and told Hadley where Ralph was working. When Burt turned his back to lock up the back door, Hadley stabbed him with his own knife. Dolores keeps her knives professionally sharpened. Burt was dead before he knew what hit him.”

  “Boy, never turn your back on an editor. Hadley seems to have a natural talent for murder. He killed Burt in a couple of clean cuts.”

  “He knew enough to wipe the knife, then put on his gloves and clean out the cash register,” Mark said. “Although he didn’t know to look under the cash drawer for the rest of the money—which made you suspicious.”

  “At least I was right about something,” I said.

  “You were right about a lot of things,” Mark said generously. “We’d never have caught him without you.” I keep forgetting. Mark really is a nice guy.

  “Then Hadley put on his beige coat, pulled down his hat and let himself out the front door. The people in the office building across the street saw the killer leave and didn’t realize it.

  “When Ralph stopped by for soup, he sealed his fate, too. Hadley figured they were in it together. It was easy to kill Ralph. Hadley called and made a date to meet Ralph at the Utah Place house. Hadley had seen Ralph with the inhaler while he waited for his soup-to-go. Ralph was sick and needed the inhaler constantly. Hadley only had to be around Ralph a few minutes to figure that out.

  “Ralph had been working on the ceiling for two hours that morning, and was already wheezing from the plaster dust. All Hadley did was lift Ralph’s inhaler from the jeans jacket by the toolbox when he wasn’t looking, and then cut the other inhaler off the ladder. Ralph never noticed. He was running around talking about his rehab work. Mother Nature, that mean mother, did the rest. Ralph had a fatal attack about an hour or two later, if you believe the pathologist’s estimate. In case the plaster dust hadn’t killed Ralph, Hadley said, he arranged to stop by the Utah house about seven that night to discuss the rehabbing job further. ‘I had my new knife,’ he said, as if that settled it.

  “After Hadley left the house with Ralph’s inhalers, he broke into Ralph’s truck. He found two more inhalers and took them, just in case Ralph made it to the truck. Then Hadley searched the truck for any information Ralph might have about Maria. He didn’t find anything, so he was satisfied that was the end of it.”

  “Good thing Ralph left the envelope with the pageant program and the newspaper clipping at his mother’s house,” I said. “Otherwise I would never have made the connection between Maria and the body in the vacant lot. Even if Ralph didn’t know that Hadley killed Maria, in a way Maria was right. Ralph and Burt made sure people knew Hadley killed her. I have to ask: Did Hadley go back and check on Ralph?”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “Hadley came back that night at seven. By then, Ralph was dead for hours. We found some plaster dust in Hadley’s car and on his shoes, but we’ll probably never be able to pin that one on him. No one saw him at the Utah house. The man had the luck.”

  “Why didn’t the neighbor lady spot him? She saw me,” I said.

  “She was at church,” said Mark.

  “Both times?”

  “Yep. That man was invisible when he wanted to be,” Mark said.

  “Was he sorry for what he did?”

  “Hadley called Ralph and Burt’s deaths ‘regrettable.’ ”

  “Regrettable? As if he could run a correction on page two for his error. That’s disgusting. Did he try to run me down at Uncle Bob’s?”

  “Hadley drove the car that chased you through the parking lot. He found out the way you feared he would—Babe, the gossip columnist. Babe went back to Hadley’s office reeking of blueberries and repeated Marlene’s remarks about Princess Di.

  “When we asked Hadley about trying to run you down, do you know what he said? ‘I panicked.’ Then he smiled as if he was confessing an endearing little fault. ‘I thought I had to get rid of her.’

  “He wasn’t too panicked, though,” Mark continued. “He knew enough not to use his own car, an easily identifiable black Mercedes. We found a credit card bill that shows he rented an anonymous gray Chevy from Rent-A-Wreck the day you were almost run down. He saw you leave the newsroom and followed you. There were too many people on Klocke, so he tailed you to Uncle Bob’s. When he saw you were alone in the parking lot, he went after you.

  “Hadley said he was glad you got away. ‘She didn’t know anything. She is only a reporter.’ ”

  “I thought Hadley didn’t know anything because he is only an editor,” I said. “We made the mistake of underestimating each other, and we both paid for it. I’ll have these reminders a long time,” I said, showing him the cut on my arm and the hole in my hand.

  “I was so sure it was Charlie,” I added. “He dated Maria. He carried a pocket knife.”

  “It wasn’t the only pocket knife in the world,” said Mark. “We found out most CG editors carried them after Hadley pulled his out at an office party. The hostess forgot a knife to cut the baked Brie, and Hadley brought out his pocket knife and said a gentleman always came prepared. After he said that, every up-and-comer at the paper, male and female, bought a pocket knife.”

  “I missed something not going to those CG parties after all,” I said. “I should never underestimate the editors’ ability to brownnose the boss. When Hadley came back from one vacation with a beard, they all grew them. You never saw so much moth-eaten facial hair. Made
it easier to identify who was going to sell us out.”

  “Must have been tough on the ambitious women,” said Mark. “They couldn’t grow beards. What did they do?”

  “They grew mustaches.”

  Mark laughed. “Hadley seems surprised that we’re charging him with your attempted murder. He said, ‘It was a crazy impulse,’ as if he was willing to forget it and we should, too.”

  “It was all crazy.”

  “That’s what Hadley’s lawyers decided. They think the Gazette managing editor is a bedbug, especially after he ignored their advice to shut up. They’re trying to get that confession thrown out. Scuttlebutt says Hadley will plead not guilty by reason of insanity.”

  “A jury of his peers,” I said, “if it includes any reporters, will probably agree. We think most editors are crazy.”

  “They love you, too,” said Mark, and left me laughing.

  Speaking of crazy, my dreams of glory were just that—dreams. I must have been as crazy as Hadley to think that my story would make the front page of the City Gazette. Even if I hadn’t been out of commission in the hospital, the City Gazette wouldn’t run headlines that said: WACKO EDITOR WHACKS READERS!

  I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to do much time in the hospital, but the doctors were worried when they found some blood between my scalp and my skull. They kept talking about a subdural hematoma. They took away my Tylenol Three, which almost wiped out the headaches, and kept waking me up and asking me what day it was and who was president. Finally, some bozo got me out of a sound sleep at 3:00 A.M. and asked me to count backward from one hundred by sevens. I told him I couldn’t do that at high noon on my best day and he better fucking leave me the hell alone. He decided my level of consciousness was normal. After two days of this torture and a CAT scan, the doctors let me go. By the time I was well enough to sit down at my computer, I’d been scooped by five TV stations, twenty-one radio stations, and even the free throwaway shopper newspaper.