Backstab

by Elaine Viets

It was starting to make sense. I knew now why Ralph had sent me those clippings. And I was almost sure that Maria Callous was the mysterious blonde Marlene called Princess Di. The woman who came from nowhere. The woman that Marlene had never seen before until she showed up with Charlie. And never saw again. Because she was dead. Because Charlie killed this dead ringer for Princess Di with her own scarf and then stabbed her with his pocket knife.

  I opened my mail and I returned some calls and then I got out of there. Half an hour was all I could take at the Gazette. It was time to see Ralph’s mother.

  Billie looked a little better today. She still didn’t look like beautiful Billie, but maybe her older sister instead of her mother.

  “Billie, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “But Ralph had an appointment with someone called Ed at the Utah Place house the morning he died. Do you know what it was about?”

  “A little,” she said. “Ralph was excited because some City Gazette editor wanted to look at his rehab work there, but he didn’t mention that was his name.”

  There were no City Gazette editors named Ed. But Ralph used other abbreviations in that appointment book. Ed wasn’t a name. It was short for “Editor.”

  “Ralph told me if the editor liked what he saw, he wanted Ralph to give him an estimate on rehabbing his own house—the whole thing. Ralph was thrilled. He thought it would be enough work to keep him going for the rest of the summer and fall.”

  “You don’t know the editor’s name?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think Ralph ever mentioned it. He never told me where the editor’s house was, either. He’d talked to the man briefly on the phone and seemed vague on those details. I think he was going to ask you about him.”

  Of course he was. He called me, but I let my answering machine take it, because I was too lazy to pick up. Suddenly, his rambling message made perfect sense. Francesca, it’s me, Ralph, he’d said. Listen, I forgot to ask you something tonight…I know for sure you know this guy ’cause you work with him, except work doesn’t really describe what he does, does it? At least that’s what you always say, ha-ha. Anyway, I’m pretty sure you can tell me if I should do this. Come on, Francesca, pick up. I know you’re there.

  Yeah, Ralph, I was there. And if I’d picked up the phone, you might still be here, too. At the very least, I’d know who your killer was. Work doesn’t really describe what he does, does it? At least that’s what you always say, ha-ha. That’s what I always said about several top CG editors. Mostly Charlie. That’s who called you, wasn’t it? That’s how he found out where you were working and took your inhalers. Did he use the same pen knife he’d cleaned his nails with at the elevator to cut your “insurance” off your ladder? But why? Why did he want to kill you? That’s what I didn’t know.

  I was going to need proof, and I couldn’t get it from Billie. That was all Billie could tell me, though I kept rephrasing the same questions until she was tired of them and so was I.

  The next person on my must-see list was Todd. I didn’t particularly want to talk to him, and after our last encounter, I didn’t expect him to want to see me. That’s why I didn’t call ahead. I just rang the doorbell. I was relieved when he answered the door. There was no sign of the pretty boy today. He looked like a petulant, slightly pudgy man. He didn’t invite me in. We stood on the chilly front porch. “Well, you accused me of murder last time,” he said. “What’s my crime now? Kidnapping? Arson? Armed robbery?”

  “Todd, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right to be angry with me. But I really am trying to find Maria’s killer. You have no reason to want to help me, but I know you want to help her.”

  I saw that stricken look in his eyes. He shivered, but I wasn’t sure it was from the cold. I wasn’t the only one carrying a load of guilt. “I know you had to get rid of Maria’s address book to protect her reputation,” I said. I might as well let him have that. “Did she leave behind anything, even a phone number on a scrap of paper? I’d like to talk to her last boy friend, if I can find him.”

  “I wish I could help you, but I can’t,” Todd said. “I had to nag her to keep important numbers in that book. I put most of them in myself. If Maria had one fault as a roommate, it was that she never wrote phone numbers on the pad I kept by the phone. She wrote the numbers on the wall by the phone. It used to drive me crazy. I screamed and sulked and repainted that wall sixteen times. I told her she picked up that habit hanging around bars. But nothing broke her of it. If a man called, she wrote the number on the wall by the phone—‘So I won’t lose it,’ she said. The only progress I ever made with all my nagging was when she wrote the last phone number from the guy she was dating on the side of the icebox. She said it would wash off. She acted like this was a big advance. Maybe for her it was. Anyway, I left it there, thinking it was better than the wall. You couldn’t see that side of the icebox from the door anyway. It’s still there. I couldn’t bring myself to clean away the last trace of her.”

  I felt like I was in a dream. “May I come in and take a look at it?”

  “Help yourself,” Todd said, finally holding the door open for me. “It’s on the side by the phone.”

  I sleepwalked into the kitchen. There was the number, written on the white refrigerator in blue ink. I didn’t have to call the number to find out who it belonged to. I knew that number immediately. It was the main number to the City Gazette.

  Maria was the woman Marlene and I called Princess Di. I was sure of it. The blond woman who was dating Charlie. A few more questions, and I’d have the proof I needed to nail Charlie. I drove back to Dolores’s house. She was finishing up in the living room, surrounded by a stack of boxes, a pile of packing paper, and three half-used rolls of tape.

  “Can I show you a photo?” I asked Dolores.

  “Sure, honey, but make it quick. I got all this to pack away and the movers will be here before you know it.”

  I pulled out the Miss American Gender Bender Pageant program, and pointed to Maria Callous’s photo. “Is that the woman who was in the bar with Charlie?”

  “Let me put on my reading glasses. I can’t see a darned thing up close,” said Dolores. “Now where did I put them in this mess?” The wait was maddening. I joined in the hunt. We checked the kitchen table, the bedside table, the back of the commode, the top of pile after pile of boxes, before Dolores finally yelled, “Found them. Set them here on the fireplace mantel, next to my coffee cup. Can’t find anything in this mess.”

  She put on her glasses and held the picture to the light, then took it over to the window. I thought I was going to crawl the wall, using my nails like rock spikes.

  “Now, finally, enough light where I can see,” she said. “Yep. That’s her. No doubt about it. What is she, a model? What’s it say? ‘Maria Callous, the Ass with Class?’ Is that nice-looking young woman a stripper?”

  “That nice-looking young woman is a nice-looking young man,” I said.

  “You’re shittin’ me,” said Dolores. I knew she was surprised. She never talked like that. “I’d never guess that nice-looking person was a guy. Wore such a pretty little navy-blue suit, too. Had a bow on the back. Real feminine. He was better-looking than most of the women we saw in the bar. Dressed better, too. Boy, you sure can’t tell these days, can you?”

  You sure can’t. I needed just a few more facts to make my case against Charlie. I didn’t want another Aryan Avenger. I knew Charlie carried a pocket knife. I knew he’d been to Burt’s Bar with Maria Callous in her little blue suit. Now I wanted to know what Maria was wearing when she was found dead in the Dumpster. Cutup Katie would know. I called and got her. I could hear an electric saw going in the background. I shouted into the phone so she could hear me better. “Are they remodeling your office?”

  “This place? Never. Who cares about an attractive morgue?”

  “Thought I heard an electric saw.”

  “You did,” said Katie. “That’s a Stryker saw. The morgue tech is buzzing a head open so I can see t
he brain. Make this quick. I don’t have a lot of time.”

  Me, either. In about two seconds, I was going to gorp. “One more question about that female impersonator autopsy,” I said. “Can you tell me anything about the clothes Michael was wearing?”

  “Yeah. They’re in the autopsy report. You didn’t ask about them, so I didn’t mention them. Let me get it.”

  She was gone just long enough for me to get queasy again from the sound of the Stryker saw. “It says here the body was dressed in a woman’s suit at the time of the examination. You know the weird thing about it? The suit was held together with Velcro.”

  “Michael used Velcro instead of zippers?”

  “No, the suit had buttons and zippers in the right places. But the seams had Velcro fastenings, so the suit could come apart. I’d never seen a suit like that. I was curious about it. Usually, the only people who use Velcro doodads on their clothes are paras and quads, because some people in wheelchairs don’t have the dexterity to do buttons and snaps. But that wasn’t what was going on with this Velcro. I found out it was breakapart clothes like actors and strippers use on stage. But this wasn’t any stripper’s costume. There was nothing flashy about that suit. You or I could have worn it.”

  “What did it look like?” I asked, although I had a pretty good idea.

  “It was a navy-blue suit. Expensive designer suit, Chanel label, with a fitted jacket. But not too tight. Definitely not cheap-looking. Not what you’d think of as hooker’s clothing. Had a cute little bow in the back.”

  “The back?”

  “Yeah, on the butt. Just above it, to be exact. I’d probably take the bow off, myself, if I wore the suit, but that’s just a matter of taste.”

  Maria Callous, the Ass with Class, with her little bow on her little blue suit, and Princess Di, the classy blonde with the little blue suit with the bow on the back. They were the same person. She was the woman Charlie had been seen with. The woman he’d passed on to his boss to promote his career. The woman who turned out to be a man.

  The woman he had to kill before his boss found out and killed his career.

  Long ago, I used to think Charlie was my mentor. Now I thought he was a murderer. What changed? Certainly not Charlie. Not in the fifteen years I’d known him. What changed was the way I saw him.

  Charlie made no bones about what he did. He was the Gazette’s master of revels, illegal and immoral. Only a prude would object. He sold a little pot to the staff. So what if the price was jacked above street rate? He thought it was funny when someone complained he made a profit off his friends. “I took the risk,” he said. “If I get caught, they won’t go to jail for me.”

  He ran the office pools, and gleefully talked about how he broke the interstate gambling laws when he called his pals at other papers around the country. So what? as Charlie would say. Most offices had a little friendly betting. But most offices didn’t print sanctimonious stories and editorials denouncing the evils of legalized gambling. The same writers who did the stories about the disgrace and disasters that befell bettors would go back and place a bet with a bookie who was a senior CG editor. Betting was bad for them, for the readers. It was okay for us, the CG staff.

  Charlie bragged about cheating on his wife. Charlie had a sixth sense for which women were dissatisfied with their men or their marriages. He could see that Ms. X or Mrs. Y was feeling unloved and unappreciated. A joke or two, drinks at the Last Word, dinner if she really held out, and he’d generally have her. Often, so would his friends. He liked to say he was good at “breaking them in and passing them around.” Several of his girl friends were passed on up the ranks to higher editors. It humiliated some. It helped the careers of others. One of Charlie’s girl friends became a Gazette editor and another got a cushy reporting job. Charlie laughed at his infidelities until you did, too. Morals were for losers. Fidelity was for saps who couldn’t get a little on the side.

  Charlie wasn’t especially good-looking. His complexion was red. He had a beer gut like a shoplifted bowling ball and a bald spot like a burnt-out lawn. But he made good looks seem like something for less fortunate men, because they couldn’t have Charlie’s smarts. Before Georgia clued me in on Charlie, I didn’t run with his crowd, but I thought he was amusing.

  Lyle hated Charlie. He was the first person who tried to straighten me out about the guy. I thought Lyle was being stuffy. One night, we argued about it after a Gazette party. I went to more of them in those days.

  “Don’t trust that man,” Lyle said.

  “I don’t have to,” I said. “I’m not married to him. What do you have against Charlie, anyway? He’s kind of funny.”

  “He betrays people,” said Lyle, seriously. “He cheats on his wife with that woman at work, Geraldine.”

  “That’s his business.”

  “He’s made it the office’s business. He screws her in his car on the company parking lot, so the whole building knows. Then he cheats on Geraldine with those eager young journalism students who try to sell him their stories.”

  “They wise up fast. If I avoided people because they played around, I’d run out of folks to talk to,” I said. “Charlie’s rather lighthearted about his affairs. If his wife and Geraldine don’t care, why should I?”

  Lyle set his mouth in a straight line. I hated when he did that. He lectured me like the college professor he was. “With Charlie, it’s not about sex, it’s about betrayal,” Lyle said. “Remember what he did to Peggy at the Christmas party?”

  No one could forget that party. Peggy was the pretty young wife of Charlie’s ex-best friend, a reporter named Josh. Charlie hit on her several times. She refused him. Charlie got Peggy drunk at the Christmas party—she was too dumb to know that the spiked fruit punch packed a wallop. Then he talked Peggy into doing a striptease. Took it off almost down to the buff. Josh was off talking in another part of the room. Charlie had us all clapping and cheering and yelling “Take it off.”

  First Peggy kicked off her penny loafers. Then she pulled off her red cotton Gap sweater and flung away her khaki pants. The cheers and whistles grew more frantic when Peggy was down to her rose-sprigged panties and bra. She still had on more clothes than most people wear on the beach, but we didn’t think she would for long. She looked pink and excited and very drunk. We weren’t much better, chanting “All off! All off!”

  Peggy was about to strip off her panties when Josh, attracted by the noise, came over to our side of the room. He saw his twenty-two-year-old wife standing in her underwear in front of the newsroom.

  “Hi, Josh,” said Charlie, wearing a boyish grin. “We just wanted to see if Peggy is a natural blonde.” Peggy sobered instantly and burst into tears. Josh wrapped her in his coat and they left. Peggy never went to another Gazette party. Josh never went anywhere at the Gazette. He and Peggy eventually moved to the West Coast and I lost track of them.

  Even after the Peggy episode, I still didn’t catch on about Charlie. “You know,” I said, settling next to Lyle on the couch one night and piling up some pillows, “Charlie’s star rose after that scene with Peggy.”

  “Showed he was management material,” Lyle said. He thought even less of the Gazette editors than I did. But I didn’t want to fight about Charlie that night. I kissed Lyle and licked his cute little ear until we both forgot about anything else.

  I felt sorry for poor Peggy. But I still enjoyed Charlie’s accounts of his escapades. Maybe I hadn’t left my parents’ world after all. Maybe Charlie was some kind of father figure for me. I certainly thought Charlie was my protector at the Gazette. I was proud to have such a savvy mentor, and I followed his advice exactly. Besides, I liked going in to scream at Hadley. It felt good. I’d probably have screamed myself right out of a job, if Georgia T. George hadn’t stopped me when I was about to commit career suicide. She was a type of editor I’d never encountered at the CG before: she believed in protecting and encouraging young talent, and stopping them before they did something stupid—like yell at the m
anaging editor when they’d been set up by a false mentor. Once Georgia showed me his back-stabbing memo, things were never the same between Charlie and me. Oh, I never confronted Charlie. Georgia told me not to, and now I followed her advice. To all outward appearances I was friendly with him. Friendly, but no longer admiring. I didn’t hang around his desk listening to him talk about the people he screwed, literally and figuratively. I quit going to most Gazette parties. It was no fun watching the same tired people preying on each other. What happened to me was an old, old corporate story, repeated endlessly at the CG, and plenty of other offices.

  It didn’t take Charlie long to figure out I’d changed toward him. Nobody said Charlie was stupid. He quickly went from a good friend to a bitter enemy. Most of the Gazette staff blamed me for the break. They said I’d turned on a man who’d given my career a boost. That’s certainly how Charlie played it. Others knew better. But they were members of a special club: they’d all been betrayed by Charlie. He was destructive. But so far, he’d only killed careers. Would he kill people, too?

  I knew Charlie could be violent. I’d heard that he came close to killing Blow Job Betty. She’s the one I told Rita the Retiree about—the one who hung around the Last Word, giving Charlie and the other guys oral sex—until the cop told them she was a he. When Betty made her next visit to the Word, she was beaten up in the parking lot. Rumor had it that Charlie was one of the people who hit her, and he would have killed her if Terry, the bartender, hadn’t stopped him. Why didn’t I connect Charlie and Maria earlier? I guess I just didn’t believe I worked with a murderer. Also, I thought Charlie was too smart to make the same mistake twice.

  What if Charlie found out he was dating another female impersonator? Would that have sent him right over the edge into murder? Charlie wasn’t the type to go into therapy and ask himself why he was attracted to men who dressed as women.

  But why kill Burt and Ralph?

  Why did they both die in the same week? What was the connection?