by Elaine Viets
There were four professional women in power suits and wedge cuts, who’d probably come here straight from the office. And that group of ten over there, toasting a young woman seated at a table overflowing with balloons, champagne bottles, and unwrapped presents, was obviously a bachelorette party. A slim, laughing redhead detached herself from the group and ran down to the front row. Was that a ten-dollar bill she was waving? Leo’s G-string was already bulging with so much money, I feared a major cash flow problem. Sure enough, when an older woman with hair the color of tarnished brass slipped a fiver in at his shaking hip, some bills fluttered to the floor. Leo ignored them and kept dancing. A couple of thrifty types picked up the money and recycled it as their tips. Talk about cheap behavior. The redhead elbowed her way through the cheapskates, and stuffed a ten down Leo’s Titanic front. There was something familiar about her manicure.
Wait a minute. I knew that woman. I’d seen her earlier today. She was a nurse. In the chemo ward at Moorton Hospital.
“Valerie!” I yelled over the noise and the music. “Valerie Cannata!”
“Francesca!” she yelled back. “How the heck are you? And what are you doing here?”
We ducked into the lounge off the main entrance to talk for a minute. “I’m doing a story for the Gazette,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”
“You get paid for covering this?” she said.
“Covering doesn’t quite describe what’s going on here. Yes, I get paid. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.”
She giggled. “We’re here for Laura. She’s an ER nurse who’s getting married Saturday. This is her last night to howl.”
“Why would an emergency room nurse who sees naked people all day want to see naked men at night?”
“She wants to see a healthy body, babe. One that’s not shot, burned, or broken. Now I’ve got a question for you. It’s plain nosy, so you can answer it or not. Are you related to that woman you came with to the chemo ward?”
“No,” I said. “Georgia doesn’t have any family here. She’s a friend. More than a friend, actually. She’s my mentor at the Gazette, the only decent editor I have. She was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor did a partial mastectomy, and now that she’s recovered from the operation, she starts chemo and radiation. I don’t want her to go alone for treatment. She’s not herself right now. She’s scared. I’ve never seen her like that before.”
Valerie patted my arm. “You hang in there, sweetie,” she said. “You’ll get through it. She will, too. It’s good that she doesn’t have to go alone. You’re doing the right thing.”
Valerie had the gift of making people feel better, just by talking to them. She didn’t ooze useless sympathy. I was glad she was working with Georgia. She also knew the right time to end things. “Hey, we’re missing that heavenly body,” she said. “Why don’t you get back to work, and I’ll get back to ogling Leo. Do you think if I ran my ATM card down the crack in his butt I could get some money?”
“Shame on you, repeating that old joke. Besides, I think the church ladies have already tried that.” I told her about the recycled tips as we rejoined the crowd. By that time, the women were wild with lust, clapping their hands and shrieking “harder, harder, harder!” while Leo danced what we used to call the Dirty Dog with Laura, the bride-to-be. One of her friends videotaped them. At least I hoped the video taper was a friend. Otherwise, most of the bride’s salary would be going for blackmail. Dollars were falling around Leo like green rain. Then, suddenly, the dancing was over. The music stopped and the strobe shut down. Leo made a graceful bow, scooped up the dropped dollars, and ran off stage.
I met him in the dressing room. Two big guys in shorts and black bow ties were barricading the dressing room door from enthusiastic fans, but the men had orders to let me in.
Sweat poured down Leo’s back, and his damp hair clung to his neck. But he ignored it. He was taking bills out of his G-string—fives, tens, twenties.
“Hey, is that a fifty?” I said.
“You bet. Got that from the big blonde in the corner.”
“The heavyset one in the green pantsuit?”
“That’s her. The bigger they are, the better they tip. Love those big, beautiful women,” he said, kissing President Grant full on the lips.
The sink was now overflowing with tip money. “I haven’t counted it all,” he said, “but the take looks like about six hundred dollars.”
“For one show?” I said, awestruck.
“Yep. I’ll do another one at eleven. The ladies don’t stay late. They’re usually heading home by midnight.”
“You make twelve hundred dollars a night?” I said.
“More when I do the rush-hour show,” he said, stuffing the money into a blue nylon gym bag. “But, hey, I work for it.”
Then he turned around. There were long, red scratches from his navel down into parts unknown, made by long, sharp fingernails cramming money into his G-string.
“My god, that looks painful,” I said.
He shrugged and shoved the last of the money into the gym bag, then zipped it shut. He picked up his costume from the floor, smoothed the wrinkles, and carefully hung it back under the plastic bag.
I stayed in the dressing room with him until the eleven o’clock show. Officer Friendly came back with a bag from McDonald’s, and ate Big Macs and fries. Neither one said much I could use in the story. Both were exhausted. Leo drank bottled water (“soda makes you fat”), ate a PowerBar, and showered. I didn’t go with him for that. Then he and Officer Friendly went through the oiling and dressing routine again, with one extra step for Leo. He covered the bloody scratches on his hips and stomach with an aloe vera salve, and then hid them with makeup. “If you look close, you’ll see some permanent scars,” he said, but that was the last thing I wanted to do. I stuck around for the second show and picked up a couple of funny quotes from the women in the audience. One grandmother insisted that I not use her name. Her friend insisted that I should. “Time the grandkids learn there’s still some life in Grandma,” she said.
By midnight, Leo’s show was over, and the Heart’s Desire became an ordinary strip joint with tired women strippers and jaded male customers. The guys only acted enthusiastic at exactly twelve, when the club doors opened again to men. They rushed inside, eager to buy drinks for the women customers left over from Leo’s show. It was plain that some of those guys were going to get lucky with women who’d been preheated by Leo’s performance.
I left a message for Steve, the manager, asking about good times to have a Gazette photographer take pictures of Leo dressing and dancing. It was after one A.M. when I finally wandered out to my car. The last women customers were gone. Only a handful of men were watching the strippers, and the huge, dusty, crushed rock parking lot was almost empty. It was a warm spring night, and there had been an April shower. All around me, the powerful parking-lot floodlights highlighted brilliant pinks and greens. But these weren’t tender spring colors. The Heart’s Desire was down the road from a chemical plant, and the puddles were unnatural colors: slime green and Pepto-Bismol pink, eerie iridescent purples and sickly reds. We were less than half a mile from the Mississippi River, and the view of the St. Louis skyline, with the silver Arch backlit by the downtown office towers, was breathtaking. So were the chemical plant’s noxious fumes. At this hour, it was belching yellow smoke. I hurried to my car, anxious to get out of the toxic air before I had two heads and tumors, like the catfish and frogs fishermen had pulled out of the nearby creeks.
In the darkest corner of the lot, where the employees had to park, I saw Leo D. Nardo talking to someone. She looked like a soft, slightly overweight woman with short gray hair. A nice, harmless person. There were a hundred like her in the audience. I didn’t pay much attention to her.
That was my mistake. I was probably the last person to see Leo D. Nardo that night.
CHAPTER 2
Something was wrong.
I could feel it when I walked int
o the newsroom that morning. There was dead silence when the staff saw me. Even the phones seemed to stop ringing. Then as I passed the reporters’ desks, I could catch swirls of giggles, sneers, and snide comments. I heard “… wait till she opens the paper … she’ll hit the … this will get her …” Staffers were smiling at me, but these were predatory smiles with too many teeth.
Something was wrong with my column, the one in today’s paper. I knew it. I just didn’t know what it was. Had I misspelled a name? Misquoted someone? Gotten some obvious fact wrong? Did someone call the paper and complain?
I’d slept late after staying at the Heart’s Desire for the Leo D. Nardo story Monday night. Now it was ten A.M., long past the time I could make any corrections. I wanted to grab the first paper I saw and check, but I couldn’t afford to look vulnerable. Not at the Gazette. So I held my head high, straightened my shoulders to dislodge the knives in my back, and ignored the sickly quivering in my stomach. I made myself walk slowly past the rest of the cityside reporters’ desks, past Rotten Row, where the big editors sat, and go slowly to my desk, where I finally picked up a paper and opened it to the Family section.
I told myself I would handle the problem, if there was one, with quiet dignity. I would not yell, no matter what boneheaded stunt management pulled. I would calmly…
“WHERE THE HELL IS MY COLUMN!!!!!”
My column was supposed to be in the paper. It was Tuesday. It was always in on Tuesday. But in place of my locally written column was a wire-service piece on spring shoe styles. What the hell happened? I saw the proofs at two o’clock yesterday and everything was fine. I wouldn’t have left work unless it was.
I marched over to the Family section editor, Wendy the Whiner. She nervously ran her fingers through her untidy, no-color hair. Her green flowered suit, which looked like it had been a slipcover in another life, complemented the slightly greenish tinge to her complexion. Wendy was expecting trouble. She was afraid.
“Now, don’t get mad at me, Francesca,” she whined. “It wasn’t my decision. It was Charlie’s.” Wendy tried to look me in the eye, but at the last minute her gaze wavered and slid sideways.
“What kind of sneaky stuff is he pulling now?” I snarled.
“That’s no way to speak of our managing editor. Charlie is measuring reader reaction to our columnists. He started with you. If we don’t hear from any readers, then we’ll know your column isn’t as popular as you think it is.”
“You know it’s popular,” I said. “Every readership survey says so. Why didn’t you tell me about this so-called test yesterday?”
“He made the decision to pull the column at the afternoon meeting.”
“I was here at two o’clock.”
“He called a special meeting for four,” she said, her eyes shifting uneasily.
Four o’clock. When Georgia, the assistant managing editor for features, was at the hospital getting chemotherapy. And I was with her. If Georgia had been at the office, she would have stopped Charlie’s latest scheme or at least warned me. Now I couldn’t go running into Georgia’s office about my column being pulled. She had real worries.
“I appreciate how you stick up for your staff,” I said.
“You don’t have to get sarcastic. It’s only a test, Francesca.”
I heard my phone ringing and ran to answer it. “Francesca, it’s Janet. Janet Smith. Why isn’t your column in today?”
“It’s a test,” I told my neighbor. Janet was furious.
“First, they make us vote for our favorite comics in the Comics Poll, so I have to fight to save ‘For Better or Worse.’ Then, they redesign the TV book, and the type is so small I can’t read the listings. Now they’re testing us by taking out your column. I’ve had enough. I’m getting the school calling tree going.”
“What’s a calling tree?” I interrupted.
“We each have a list of ten names to call, and those ten names have ten names, and so on. It adds up to three hundred parents, and they’re already angry. Your paper will not print anything but bad news about our city schools, and we’re tired of it. If your managing editor wants phone calls, he’ll get them. And while we’re on the phone, we’ll tell him exactly what we think about the Gazette’s education reporting. We’re sick of the rich kids in Parkway and Ladue getting all the good stories, while our city kids are branded as hoodlums.”
As soon as she hung up, the phone rang again. It was Debbie, the manager at Uncle Bob’s Pancake House, where I had breakfast almost every day.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “Where were you today, and where is your column? We had a rush of customers this morning and when I finally got a chance to sit down with a paper and a cup of coffee, you weren’t in. This is Tuesday, right?”
“Sorry, Debbie,” I said. “I got up late and didn’t make it in this morning. And my column didn’t make it in, either. Charlie’s pulled it as a test.”
“Oh, he did, did he? Looks like I’ll have to make a sign, informing everyone at Uncle Bob’s what happened. What numbers should we call, honey?” she said.
I gave her Wendy’s and Charlie’s numbers, and hung up feeling much better. My readers always went to bat for me. Like a Tennessee Williams character, I relied on the kindness of strangers. I stayed at my desk, working on my column for Thursday and taking more phone calls from readers asking why I wasn’t in the paper. I also called the Heart’s Desire to talk to Leo D. Nardo, but he wasn’t in yet. I’d call him tomorrow.
Occasionally, I’d look up and see a harried Wendy talking on the phone, apparently about my column. “It’s just for a day,” she’d say, sounding aggrieved. “She’ll be back in the paper on Thursday. You don’t have to get so upset. We gave her the day off.” Way across the newsroom, I could also see Charlie’s secretary, Evelyn, talking on one phone, while another line kept ringing. She looked exasperated. Good. By the time I was ready to leave at three-thirty to get Georgia, Wendy was not answering her phone anymore.
“Your phone is ringing, Wendy,” I said, as I headed for the door.
“I can’t deal with any more of your callers, Francesca,” she said. “They’re so angry.”
“They’re just testy,” I said, sweetly.
I was supposed to meet Georgia in front of her apartment building at three forty-five. Apartment was an inadequate word for Georgia’s fourteen-room penthouse overlooking Forest Park. It even had a terrace and a hot tub. That apartment was one of the things that kept her at the Gazette. She knew she couldn’t live in high-rise splendor if she moved to the company headquarters in Boston. There wasn’t much chance of her going to Boston, anyway, not since she’d told the publisher what she thought of his latest plans to cut the paper’s staff and delay buying new equipment. Georgia was out of favor.
There was no one but a tiny old woman standing outside the massive stone building, huddled near the door to avoid the sharp spring winds. Then, with a shock, I realized that was Georgia. Georgia was fifty-five years old, and weighed maybe one-ten if you threw in the wet towel, but she was such a powerful presence I never saw her as any particular age, and never thought of her as small. Now she looked aged and shrunken. But when she saw my blue Jaguar, Ralph, round the corner, she straightened up and seemed like her old self again. She opened the door, took a deep snort, and said, “Damn, I love this car. Smells like money.”
That was my old foul-mouthed friend. Georgia started at the paper when the highest compliment a woman could get was, “You think like a man.” She cussed and drank like one to prove she could write like one. It worked. Georgia escaped the pink ghetto of the women’s pages, and did some solid investigative reporting before she was promoted to editor. Her marriage fell apart years ago, and her ex-husband moved away. She had no children. The Gazette was her life, and now she was afraid she would lose it. That’s why she had me pick her up at her apartment, so no one from the office would see us leaving together, and maybe follow out of curiosity. She didn’t want anyone to know she was going to the ho
spital for treatment.
“Are you sure you want to keep hiding this from Charlie?” I said.
Her face set into a stubborn line. “I don’t want that jackass weeping crocodile tears by my bedside,” she said.
“Uh, I think you’ve mixed your metaphors.”
“Animals,” she corrected, ever the editor. Then she said, “I’m not going to die like Milt!”
“You aren’t going to die, period,” I snapped. I hated when she talked that way.
“How do you know?” she said.
“I won’t let you,” I said.
“I thought only editors mistook themselves for God. Listen, Francesca, you’d understand how I felt if you’d worked at the Gazette when Milt was dying of brain cancer.”
“But I did. I was new, but I remember. Charlie had just started his rise.”
“He climbed over Milt’s dead body,” she said. “Milt was a great editorial writer. If he hadn’t been so sick, he’d have never let Charlie near him.”
That wasn’t quite true. Charlie could be charming when he wanted something, and he wanted the great man’s blessing. He didn’t have any integrity of his own, but he borrowed some from the dying Milt, and it would advance him.
“Charlie professed to be an admirer of Milt’s,” Georgia said. “He perched at his bedside like a vulture. He’d bring back weepy reports of poor Milt’s suffering to the newsroom. He read stories to him when his eyesight failed. When Milt went into a final coma, Charlie left his side only once—to claim Milt’s nearly new computer. Took it right off the dying man’s desk.”
“Charlie was only an assistant editor back then, wasn’t he?” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. “He’d never have had a computer that good if he hadn’t swiped it from a sick man. I keep my office door locked.”
The dying Milt got the standard treatment for seriously sick staffers at the Gazette. The power grab went on while they were ailing: the plum assignments and the best beats were carved out of their workload. Sometimes, if their desks occupied prime newsroom real estate, those were taken, too. If the sick staffers survived, they often came back to find themselves shoved off in a corner, doing drudge work. Too tired to fight anymore, many of them took early retirement. If they died, their grieving family was shipped a stack of cardboard boxes containing their things—or at least the things the other staffers didn’t want. Readers never saw this side of the Gazette. The dead reporters got wonderfully weepy obituaries in the Gazette.