by Elaine Viets
“Make that to go,” I yelled. Two minutes later, I grabbed the grease-spotted bag and headed back to my flat.
The salt-spangled fries and sliders glistening with hot grease slid down easily while I did my Internet search. I found several recipes using the little burgers, including a White Castle turkey stuffing. (Belly Bomber Thanksgiving dressing. The folks at Tums would be thankful indeed.) I was tempted by the Broccoli “Castlerole” recipe, which used ten White Castles, four packages of chopped frozen broccoli, a box of Velveeta, and Ritz crackers.
But the White Castle pâté had classic simplicity. I’d need a blender, but I thought I had one somewhere that belonged to my grandmother. I rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets, shoving aside dusty Dutch ovens, a meat grinder, and an ancient turkey roaster, until I found a blender from a long-ago margarita party. That had been a real success. Grandma had misread the directions on the mix, doubled the booze, and sent half the party home in cabs. The rest went home on all fours.
I lived in my grandparents’ South Side flat, and I hadn’t changed anything since they died. I still had the same slipcovers on the sofa and all my grandfather’s bowling trophies in the living room. Over the old Magnavox console TV hung a picture of Jesus whose eyes followed you around the room. Plastic roses were twined in the picture frame. The kitchen had a massive gas refrigerator, a Sunbeam toaster shiny as a chrome bumper, and a monster Magic Chef stove with a warming oven. Just looking at that thing gave me delusions I could cook. On the bathroom wall were Grandma’s plaster fish with the three gold bubbles and a top-hat toilet paper cozy she’d knitted herself. A decorator friend called the place a perfect museum of kitsch. I couldn’t see buying all new stuff at Crate & Barrel. Besides, I admired my grandparents’ good, honest lives. I guess it was a way of keeping them with me.
I checked the clock. Six-eleven. Mrs. Indelicato’s confectionary was just opening downstairs. That used to be my grandparents’, too. A confectionary was the St. Louis precursor to the convenience store. Most are gone now, but not my grandparents’. Some of the same families they waited on still stop in the store for six-packs, Pampers, and a pound of boiled ham. Mrs. I took it over and ran it the way they did, which meant she didn’t make any money, either. She lived in three rooms in back of the store, and had appointed herself my guardian. Mrs. I was furious when I broke up with Lyle, and hardly spoke to me for months. She was finally beginning to thaw, but she still gave me the cold shoulder sometimes. I gave her a cheery morning greeting. She waved back, and I relaxed. She was busy unpacking Campbell’s soup, and even at that hour her shirtwaist was perfectly starched and every iron gray hair was in place. I bought bacon, yogurt, sour cream, and a bunch of rather elderly parsley.
“You’re cooking, I see,” she said, approvingly. She hoped I would settle down and embrace the womanly virtues, or at least a good man.
“Yes, I’m making pâté,” I said. I didn’t add that the other ingredients were fifteen White Castles.
Half an hour later, I was back home, slowly grinding up White Castles in the whirring blender. The recipe called for the whole burger, including bun, pickle, and onion. I fed in three at a time, adding a little water to help them blend. The resulting mush was pretty gross-looking. Next, I buttered a loaf baking pan, and put the bacon strips on the bottom. I figured the cholesterol level was now up there with Brazil’s national debt. I poured the glop into the pan, and baked it at three twenty-five for forty-five minutes. When I opened the oven, I swear it burped. This pâté definitely didn’t look like it came out of a can. Not unless it had “dog food” on the label. It looked better after it cooled and I covered it with sour cream and yogurt, and sprinkled parsley on top. Then I shoved it down the garbage disposal. No way was I going to eat that.
But Charlie had his tested recipe, and I wouldn’t have to do a Dialog St. Louis. And somewhere during this foolishness, the blood-soaked visions of yesterday vanished. I was tired, but no longer afraid. I went to bed—my real bed, not a chair—and fell into a dreamless sleep until ten A.M., when a truck in the alley woke me up. Damn. Late again. I called the Gazette and left a message that I was working on a project for Charlie. Then I went to Uncle Bob’s, where I tested their recipe for scrambled eggs and toast. Perfect. I’d have to write it down sometime.
I picked up a newspaper from the box outside. The Moorton Massacre, as the Gazette called the hospital shootings, took up almost the whole front section. The police had been concerned for Georgia’s safety. They said they would not release her name to the other media, and urged us to keep her name out of our stories. She’d said the hell with that, news was news. But I had called Charlie from the scene on Mayhew’s cell phone, and for once he made a decent executive decision, although for the wrong reason. “Shit yes, keep her name out of it and where she works, too,” he said. “Especially where she works. I don’t want some nut with a gun coming up to the newsroom. My office is too close to hers.”
Now I saw my story on the front page, and winced. I’d written the eyewitness account last night, although I didn’t see a darn thing, and our police reporter wrote an equally informative news story, and we’d run a four-column photo of a body bag being wheeled out that looked like all body-bag photos. For all I knew, we had a stock photo we ran with all shooting stories.
The victim profiles had emotional quotes from hospital spokespeople about what healers and helpers the deceased were. I noticed no colleagues or patients seconded that emotion. No one mentioned the receptionist’s nearly criminal cruelty, or said the doctor and the radiation therapist behaved like unfeeling jackasses with their patients. No one said the esteemed doc probably used the therapist as a human shield, either.
The few facts I did see indicated the three victims did not have deep roots in St. Louis. The receptionist was forty-seven, single, and lived alone in an apartment in Brentwood. Her parents and one sister lived in Lansing, Michigan. The doctor, a radiation oncologist, had moved here from Boston a year ago, leaving his ex-wife and child back in Massachusetts. The therapist was also divorced. He’d recently graduated with an associate degree and radiation therapy certification from North Oregon Community College. No clubs, hobbies, organizations, or churches were mentioned. Take away their cruelties and carelessness, and these people almost didn’t exist.
I guess I should have volunteered to write the victim profiles, and given the Gazette a more truthful story. But the paper would have never printed it. Readers would have been fascinated and outraged and our phones would have rung off the hook, but editors found polite fairy tales easier to deal with. So I’d batted out my first person non-account and gone home. I’d driven Georgia home after the police took her statement yesterday, and she’d sent me straight to the Gazette after I got her upstairs. She promised she’d take a sedative that would knock her out for the night. I wondered if she’d even come in to work today. I was worried. How would she hold up during her treatment ordeal, now that her secret was out at the Gazette? I was afraid she’d be too sick and upset to work. I could see the ambitious staffers circling like vultures.
I underestimated Georgia. When I got to the Gazette that Friday morning, she was sitting at her desk, briskly going through a stack of papers, her usual fearless self. I heard from several reliable sources, who just happened to be hanging around outside Charlie’s office, that she had marched in there and announced that yes she had cancer but the doctors had removed it. She was in treatment now, but she was recovering and she’d sue his socks off if he tried any shenanigans. She looked better than I’d seen her in months.
I poked my head in the door and asked how she was. “Fucking fine and dandy,” she’d answered in her finest foul-mouthed style. “What the hell are you grinning about? Don’t you have work to do?”
I did. Besides, I’d just appointed myself head of a new project. I was going to solve the Moorton Massacre. Might as well use the time I was there with Georgia. If I succeeded, Charlie would quit sending me on foolish and demeaning assignm
ents. I could interview people who kept their clothes on for a living. Not that I minded Leo D. Nardo. The lad was decorative. But Charlie had originally wanted me to interview a female stripper. That story would have been illustrated with a page of porky photos, guaranteed to turn off women readers. Next he wanted me to write for that snore, Dialog St. Louis. I’d successfully evaded that, too. But how long could I keep dodging Charlie’s turkeys? If my name was on too many bad stories, I’d start losing readers. I was tired of fighting, but I couldn’t stop, or I’d be one more burned-out Gazette writer. A major success would let me win the Charlie wars.
Poor lost Leo. I could write about the strange case of the male stripper who took off—maybe for good—and it would be an interesting story. But if I could solve the Moorton Massacre, I was looking at major prizes. Fame and freedom would be mine. Then I thought, what a sweetheart I was, using three dead people to advance my career. Maybe I was more of a Gazette employee than I wanted to admit, even to myself. On the other hand, I had to be at the hospital, anyway. Why not ask some questions?
I ran into Charlie lurking in the back hall by my department. “Well, Francesca,” he oozed, “where’s your recipe? Or are you ready to start on the Dialog St. Louis page?”
“I have a recipe, a good one,” I said. His face fell. “You’ll love it, Charlie. It’s a pâté. Uses fifteen ingredients from a major advertiser. Has a classy name, too: Pâté du Chateau Blanc.”
“Have it on my desk by noon,” he said, gruffly. Charlie was a sore loser. He immediately turned on me. “Where’s your day in the life of a stripper story? I assigned that weeks ago. I want it by noon Monday.”
“That’s when my regular column is due,” I said. “But I’d love the overtime.” Overtime was against Charlie’s religion.
“Noon Tuesday then,” he said.
At eleven-thirty, I left to take Georgia for her radiation treatment. Moorton’s radiation oncology center was temporarily closed, so we went to nearby Barnes-Jewish Hospital. The staff was fast, efficient, and professional. But it was two-thirty by the time I got Georgia back to the office. Then I worked on my column, so I’d have Monday free to do the legwork on Leo.
Friday night found me heading across the river to the Heart’s Desire strip joint. Leo had been gone four days now. I talked with Steve, the club manager. He was a paunchy guy whose hair was dyed that brassy blond you see on pro wrestlers. Tight pants and a shiny black shirt, gold chains, and black chest hair completed the ensemble. Steve had a sleazy, night-crawler look. But I’ll give him this: he seemed sincerely worried about Leo.
“Something’s wrong,” Steve said. “Leo would never just up and leave. He was a professional. He never missed a performance, even when he had the flu. I filed a missing person’s report. The police sent someone out to talk to me, but the guy seemed to be going through the motions. I don’t think the police are taking it seriously.”
But his customers were. Business was down without the Titanic Lover. We were sitting in the bar, a half hour before show time, surrounded by empty seats. No wonder Steve was desperate to find Leo D. Nardo.
“Did Leo have any girlfriends?” I asked.
“Not really. Leo was a healthy red-blooded young man, nothing funny about him. But he never dated one woman long. And a lot of them were customers.”
“You didn’t mind?”
“Mind? I loved it. Word was getting out that a girl might have a chance with Leo, especially if she was generous.” He winked at me. Yuck. “If they even thought they could take a stud like Leo home, they tipped like crazy and bought premium drinks.”
“Was Leo seen with anyone the night he disappeared?”
“Nah. Just some old lady. Officer Friendly saw them talking. Listen, anything you can do to locate Leo, I’d sure appreciate it. My business is dropping like a rock out a high-rise window.”
He gave me Leo’s address and phone, and two photos: a fetching headshot and one of Leo in mid-strip. Then Steve let me backstage to talk to Officer Friendly. The poor officer looked hangdog. He was the perfect second banana, and pushing him into top billing seemed too much pressure. He was spreading oil on his body with a hopeless “we who are about to die” air. But he tried to be helpful about the woman he’d seen with Leo.
“I didn’t get a good look at her,” he said. “She was seventy-something, I’d guess. About five-five or six, a little on the chunky side, shortish gray hair, pantsuit, flat old-lady shoes.”
Sounded like the woman I saw. Sounded like half the older women in St. Louis.
“Do you think she was asking him for a date?”
Officer Friendly snorted. “No way. She was old. Anyway, most old ladies don’t have money. They live on Social Security. The ones with the bucks are in their forties and fifties. They’re not bad-looking, they tip big, and they’re horny as hell, pardon my French. Some of the divorced ladies, or even the married ones with husbands who ignore ’em, they can get pretty grabby with a guy. They’d give Leo little presents or help pay the rent, and he’d go out with them. He also dated real young, pretty ones sometimes, but they had no money. But this lady was too old. Grandmotherly, you know what I mean?”
“Any of them get jealous?”
“No, Leo had a way of talking himself out of trouble.”
“Speaking of talking, did you hear what the older woman and Leo were talking about?”
“No, but I wouldn’t worry about it. She didn’t lay a hand on him. She seemed almost worshipful. When I got in my car, they were still standing there. I really didn’t pay much attention, but I sure didn’t think she could kidnap Leo.”
I didn’t either. But she might know where he went, or if he stayed to talk to someone else. Except I didn’t bother to get a good look at her. Stupid. Stupid. I lectured guys about not really seeing older women, then I did the same thing.
Well, I would definitely look at Leo’s roommate. His name was Justin, he was home when I called, and said I could come over to their place. It was about eight-thirty when I finally found his apartment complex off Dorsett and I-270, the official home of St. Louis’s struggling young singles. With the money Leo pulled in, I’d have thought he’d live somewhere splendid. But Leo and Justin shared a two-bedroom apartment in a flat-roofed brick complex with an acre of asphalt parking lot. In the summer, the place must be an oven. The inside defined bachelor squalor.
Justin was an ordinary twenty-something with very short mousy-brown hair, a goatee, and a beginning beer gut. It didn’t seem to bother him to live with a hunk like Leo. He was a nice enough kid, a waiter at an Italian restaurant. The hallway’s focal point, as the decorators say, was a mountain bike, set off with Rollerblades and backpacks. I stepped around them, and followed Justin into a living room furnished with a pale green couch with dirty arms, two beat-up chairs, a weight bench, barbells, a state-of-the-art sound system, and big-screen TV. The coffee table was a plywood sheet on four cinder blocks. It was covered with pizza boxes, half-eaten bowls of cereal, milk glasses, and beer cans. A large black Lab snoozed on the sofa. He looked up, lazily thumped his tail, and went back to sleep. Must be exhausted from wrecking the hardwood floors. A fish tank by the window was filled with green algae.
No wonder Leo sounded restless when he talked with me. If he was thirty, I suspected this life was getting old.
“I’ve already told the police what I know,” Justin said. “But if it will help find Jack—I mean Leo—I’ll talk to you, too. I’m really worried about him. I haven’t seen him since he went to work Monday. He never came home. Some nights he’d stop for dinner and get in about three, or maybe stay with someone, but he always came home by eleven A.M. He was bodybuilding and took a lot of vitamins and protein powders and shi—I mean stuff—at eleven every morning. Jack was a little nuts on the subject. That’s why I think something is wrong. He wouldn’t go this long without his vitamins. He said they kept him dancing.”
I followed him into the kitchen to see the pill collection. My shoe soles stuck
to the kitchen floor, and made slurping noises as I walked. A ten-gallon trash can sat next to the kitchen table. The sink was awash with dirty dishes and go-cups with sports logos. I was afraid to look in the pots on the stove.
Justin opened a kitchen cabinet. The shelves were loaded with vitamins and bodybuilding supplements in giant plastic bottles. Leo didn’t need to lift weights. Just picking up the bottles should have given him muscles. I read some of the labels: SuperTwin High Potency Multiple Vitamins—bet that title was big with a male audience. Thermogenic Diet Fuel. Advanced Joint Support. Whey Protein Supplement. Two thousand grams of Pure Creatine Monohydrate. A box of twenty-four sports bars. “This stuff costs a fortune,” Justin said. “Most of those bottles are twenty to fifty bucks each, and those sports bars are two bucks apiece. He’d never leave them.”
He said Leo’s black Jeep wasn’t on the lot, and there was no sign of the blue gym bag with the nice green lining. His suitcase was still in the closet.
“Any clothes missing from his closet?”
“Nothing. Take a look.”
Leo’s bedroom had an unmade king-size waterbed, a battered dresser decorated with souvenir liquor bottles, another stereo, and a CD tower. Shirts, socks, pants, shorts, belts, towels, and bikini underwear were dropped in piles on the floor, the dresser, and the bed. Two shirts and a jockstrap hung on the CD tower. The closet door was open. Inside were thickets of empty hangers, two flashy-looking suits, and a costume under plastic. On the closet floor, under a jumble of shoes, hangers, and clothes, was a black nylon suitcase.
“How can you tell his clothes are all here?” I said.
“I can see them,” Justin said, surprised I would ask. “This probably looks like a mess, but he’s got his clothes sorted into piles for clean, dirty, and dirty-but-I-can-wear-it-if-I-have-to.”
I found Leo’s leather jewelry box under a mildewed towel. It had a lot of chunky, cheesy stuff you find in pawnshop windows: gold chains, big rings with cloudy stones, link bracelets, cigar cases.
