by Elaine Viets
CHAPTER 6
Nothing happened.
My story about Leo D. Nardo ran, but it didn’t solve the mystery of his disappearance. No one saw him after he left the Heart’s Desire—no one who would admit it, anyway. His killer, if there was one, didn’t want to discuss it. I’d hoped the gray-haired woman seen talking to him in the parking lot would call. But she didn’t.
Plenty of Leo’s fans called, though. They wanted to talk about the times they’d seen him dancing. They described his active abs and gorgeous glutes in graphic detail. It was like being trapped in a sorority of heavy-breathers. Jeez, no wonder Leo wanted to get away from his life. I was afraid he got his wish, too. I tried not to think about the strangely innocent man with the wicked body lying in a shallow grave.
I kept asking questions at Moorton Hospital, but I got nowhere there, either. I talked with all the chemo nurses. I tracked down several of Dr. Brentmoor’s patients, and everybody I could find who went to radiation oncology in the week before the killings. We regulars recognized each other, so it was easy to start a conversation. Georgia belonged to the club. It wasn’t exclusive—more than one out of three Americans has cancer—but the initiation is hard. Once you’ve heard those words, “You have cancer,” you never look at life the same way. You’re a different person, and so is everyone who cares about you. That’s why patients talked to me when they wouldn’t talk to the police. I was an associate member of the club, thanks to Georgia. I heard countless examples of Dr. Brentmoor’s uncaring arrogance and radiation oncology’s criminal rudeness. But no one saw anything that would lead to murder, or heard anyone making death threats.
I was frustrated at the dead ends. But there was one good result. Sometimes I didn’t think about Lyle for a whole day. A whole half day, anyway. Then I would see something, any little thing—a man who looked like him from the back, or whose hair curled over his forehead like Lyle’s, and the loneliness would hit me like a punch to the gut. It sounds terrible, but I was glad Georgia’s illness distracted me.
When I took to brooding too much, I went to Uncle Bob’s. I got my first lead there. Along with my skimpy breakfast, Marlene served up a generous side of gossip. She poured herself a cup and sat down in my booth.
“I’m on break now,” she said, “and I have some news you can use. A customer who’s a nurse at Moorton told me that Dr. Better Sell Brentmoor was running around on his wife with a nurse.”
“Now there’s a real surprise,” I said. “I bet half the doctors at the hospital are cheating on their wives with nurses.”
“I bet your estimate is low,” she said. “But my source says Brentmoor got the nurse pregnant.”
“No surprise there, either. My friend Jinny Peterson was a family planning counselor at a women’s clinic, and she used to see way too many pregnant nurses, and the father was often a doctor. You’d think if anyone would know where babies come from, it would be doctors and nurses. But you’d be surprised how many nurses came in for abortions. They really believed the doctor would leave his wife and marry them.”
“Brentmoor was going to leave his wife and marry her,” Marlene said.
I think my mouth dropped open. “You’re joking.”
“Not according to this nurse. She says Stephanie the wife was on her way out, and the nurse—her name is Heather—was on her way in.”
“She must have been a knockout,” I said.
Marlene shrugged. “Not really, not what I heard. She was not as classy as the current Mrs. Brentmoor, but she was a lot younger and curvier.”
“Maybe with a nice settlement, the current Mrs. Brentmoor would be happier without him. He sounded like a real jerk.”
“He was. But Heather told my nurse that Brentmoor was ‘really going to rub his wife’s nose in it.’ She wouldn’t get a penny. He’d hired Hal Hawthorn. Know who he is?”
“Sure. The big Clayton divorce lawyer.”
“The big mean divorce lawyer. The kind who declares war on the spouse and strips her of everything. Mrs. Brentmoor would have come home from lunch at the Woman’s Exchange one day real soon and found the electricity cut off, her charge cards canceled, and her checking account cleaned out. And that would be just for starters. Before she knew it, she’d be selling real estate to pay the rent, like every other fortyish West County divorcée.”
“Sounds like Dr. Brentmoor died at exactly the right time.”
“And you know,” she said, “it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.”
I thanked Marlene and tipped her well, which wasn’t difficult when my entire breakfast came to three dollars and seventeen cents.
All the way downtown, I thought about what Marlene had told me. Was Brentmoor really planning to dump his wife for Nurse Heather? Her information was usually accurate, but I needed more confirmation. Unfortunately, I knew who I’d have to talk to, and I dreaded it. This was exactly the sort of thing Babe, our gossip columnist, would know.
A lot of Gazette reporters treated Babe as a joke. I thought he was the symbol of everything wrong with the paper. He was on the take in lots of sleazy little ways. The Gazette had a policy that reporters couldn’t accept gifts or free meals, but Babe ate free at the best restaurants in town nearly every night. Restaurant owners had to swallow tabs of two hundred dollars or more, because Babe brought his friends. He never tipped. Bars and restaurants that played his game were touted as “society watering holes” in Babe’s column. Places that didn’t got snotty little digs. Every day, tribute arrived at his desk: flowers, candy, gift certificates. Store owners gave him “discounts” on jewelry and clothes. The Gazette management knew what he was doing and permitted it because they used his inside gossip, too. Just like I was about to do. I guess that made me as bad as them, but at least I felt guilty about it.
Babe was on the phone when I got to his desk. The person he was talking to must not have been important, because Babe was rude and abrupt. “Listen, I don’t have time to take that down. If you want to see your item in my column, fax me the information.” He hung up the phone without saying good-bye.
“Stupid bitch!” he said. “Do I look like a secretary?”
“Certainly not,” I said truthfully. Babe didn’t look like anything normal or useful. He was tall, pale, and cadaverously thin. Babe was a creature of the night and low light. The morning sun revealed his blotched and pouchy face, and the broken veins on his nose.
“I saw you lost a column regular to the Doc in the Box killer,” I said. “Dr. Brentmoor.”
Babe looked solemn. “He was a truly great man. A terrible loss for the hospital and the city. Terrible.”
“What about his wife Stephanie?”
“That bitch.” It was Babe’s favorite word for women who were not important. I knew immediately Stephanie’s stock had fallen dramatically. “The only thing she ever did was run after me to get her name in my column. ‘Babe, please come to our party Saturday night. Charlie your managing editor will be there,’ he said in a singsong voice. ‘Babe, please come to the benefit. John Goodman will be there.’ Babe this and Babe that. And those dresses! Oh, my god, the money she spent on clothes, and she still looked like an overdressed ragpicker. Those short skirts and knobby knees. I wonder how Brentmoor stood her.”
Babe paused to deliver his payload. “He was going to dump her, you know, and I couldn’t wait to see what Hal Hawthorn was going to do to her.” Babe looked gleeful at Stephanie’s downfall. “She was living in a house in Ladue that cost a million and a half dollars—and she spent another half million decorating it. She told me that, and I knew her decorator. When Hawthorn finished with her, she’d be lucky to afford a one-bedroom dump in Florissant.” Florissant, a blue-collar suburb out by the airport, was social Siberia to Babe. “She’s just lucky her husband died. Especially since that nurse he was going to marry was pregnant. Pregnant. Can you imagine?”
“What will happen to the nurse?” I asked.
“She’s screwed. Dumb bitch.” Babe’s eyes glowed wit
h hatred just for a second and then went dead again. I’d glimpsed the loathing he must feel for the people he wrote about. If Brentmoor had married the nurse, she would have been a new star in Babe’s column, someone else he’d have to suck up to for silly one-paragraph items. But that hadn’t happened. She no longer existed in his world.
I wanted to disinfect my entire body after my encounter with Babe, but I had what I needed: two sources confirming the information. Time for the next step. I called the new widow, Stephanie Brentmoor, and told her I wanted to write about her late husband. Stephanie naturally assumed I wanted to do a tribute, and I didn’t say anything to persuade her otherwise. She was eager to talk to me. “I’m not playing tennis today,” she said. “But I have a luncheon at the club, so perhaps you could come over this afternoon at one-thirty? I live on Upper McKnight Road. Do you have any idea where that is located?” She could have added, “you peasant.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I have another engagement this afternoon. I couldn’t make it before two.” I didn’t tell her my other engagement was taking Georgia for radiation treatment. Let Stephanie think my social calendar was crowded with glamorous events.
Stephanie Brentmoor lived in Ladue, my least favorite part of St. Louis. Lyle used to say I had a grudge against the place because the inhabitants were so rich, but that wasn’t true. They weren’t exactly on welfare in Town and Country, but I didn’t hate that suburb. I objected to Ladue’s old money arrogance. A few rich white guys from Ladue ran the city, and didn’t give a damn about anyone but their own in-crowd.
Upper McKnight was between Upper Ladue Road and Upper Barnes Road. There was no lower anything in Ladue. Twisty and tree shaded, it was a tame Disney woods of baby deer and bunny rabbits. I caught snowdrifts of white dogwood through the green leaves and brilliant patches of hot pink azaleas and exotic flowers I couldn’t name. Upper McKnight was in what passed for a mixed neighborhood in Ladue: the old money WASPs had to tolerate living alongside new money and a few Jewish people. The only brown people I saw here were wearing uniforms.
The Brentmoor house, like its neighbors an eighth of a mile away, was a colonial-style white stone with green shutters. I rang the doorbell. A coffee-colored housekeeper in a white polyester uniform answered the door, said Mrs. Brentmoor would see me in the den, and she would take me there. I got to see some of the half-million-dollar decorating on the way. The place looked like a Ralph Lauren showroom. He was the perfect choice for the unsure new rich. It was difficult to commit any sins of bad taste with Ralph, but Stephanie and her decorator skirted close to the line. In fact, they skirted, swagged, looped, draped, and tasseled the line. I would have been satisfied with the tassel concession alone. There were tassels on little gold ornamental keys in little marquetry tables, tassels on cushions, curtains, and shade pulls.
The tassels stopped at the den, which looked like an expensive English men’s club in forest green and burgundy leather, except everything was brand new. The bookcase had Danielle Steel and LaVyrle Spencer hardbacks on the lower shelves. I was pretty sure the upper shelves had been filled by the decorator. I couldn’t see a Danielle Steel fan reading leather-bound versions of Dickens and Eugene Field. One whole wall was devoted to photos of Dr. and Mrs. Brentmoor posed with conservative celebrities: Charlton Heston at an NRA fund-raiser, Henry Kissinger at a children’s home benefit. I’d covered that shindig, and I knew the cocktail party and photo with Henry cost an extra thousand dollars. I wondered what the Reagan and Bush photos went for. In each one, Stephanie had perfect hair, high-priced clothes, and that ready-to-scream smile.
She looked much more relaxed in person. I wondered if that had to do with the late doctor’s timely death, which saved her income and social position. Her blond hair was perfect and she was thin enough to be mistaken for a closetful of coat hangers. But she had unusual gray eyes that never showed well in the photos. She was about five-nine, but looked taller. Stephanie made her entrance after I’d had just enough time to be impressed with her possessions. She took her place on a shiny new leather sofa covered with hobnails and plaid pillows.
Her well-tailored beige pants, long-sleeved beige silk shirt, and pearls looked like an illustration for “How to Dress Like Old Money.” Stephanie had everything down right, but something was missing—the careless arrogance, perhaps. Under Stephanie’s silk I thought I sensed something tough and scrappy. She’d fought hard to get here and she’d fight harder to stay.
“I’m sorry we’ve never met, but I just love your managing editor, Charlie, and his new wife, Nadia. I see them at so many events. He’s such a hoot,” she said, letting me know she hobnobbed with the Gazette management and I didn’t.
“Parties are Babe’s territory and thank goodness,” I said. “I’m not a party person.” So much for establishing a rapport with my subject.
The housekeeper brought in coffee, and things settled down. Stephanie went into full gracious mode. I threw her some softball questions about her life and family. They had two sons, “both in college now, so my carpooling days are over. I nearly went mad trying to coordinate all their sports and school activities.” George Junior was going to be a doctor like his father. The Brentmoors had been married twenty-five years. She had been an elementary school teacher when they met. After their marriage, she taught for a few years, then became a full-time homemaker. She chaired the hospital fund-raiser and loved helping the less fortunate. She didn’t strike me as grieving, but she said the right things.
I asked her about the awful day Dr. Brentmoor was killed. I wanted to find out if she had an alibi. She wanted to retell the whole dramatic story. “I was at a Junior League luncheon, we had Peter Raven from the Missouri Botanical Garden speaking—you know Peter, don’t you?—and we were just being served our salads when I got the terrible news and went rushing to my husband’s side, but it was too late,” she said. She managed to look sad, although she didn’t cry. She also didn’t mention the part about demanding his paycheck over his dead body. I wondered what else she was leaving out.
We went on like that for a half hour, and then when I’d asked all the polite questions, I started in on the impolite ones. It’s an old journalist’s trick to save the worst for last. That way if you’re thrown out, you still have most of your interview.
“Mrs. Brentmoor, I am really sorry about your husband’s death, but I must ask you to help me put some rumors to rest. I understand that your husband was having a … relationship … with a nurse at the hospital, and she was having a child and he was planning to marry her.” And dump you and divorce you and leave you without a penny.
Stephanie’s gray eyes turned to granite, and any graciousness was gone. “Let’s get one thing straight, Francesca. I am Mrs. George Brentmoor, the widow of Dr. Brentmoor. Period. If you print anything—and I mean anything—to the contrary I’ll sue you and that fishwrap you write for.”
“I can certainly ask questions on subjects that people are discussing,” I said. I wasn’t intimidated by her.
“There was no divorce,” she said. “No papers were ever filed. And if that blond bimbo says it’s his kid, she better have a DNA test to prove it, because she probably slept with every doctor at the hospital. Got it?”
I got it, and I got out of there. I had a certain grudging admiration for Stephanie. She was as tough as a two-dollar sirloin.
Could she have murdered her philandering husband? I wouldn’t put it past her. But how did her husband’s murder tie into the other killings? Had she killed him and made it look like a Doc in the Box killing? Would she murder four innocent people as a cover for the killing she wanted? It had been done before. And Stephanie was cold-blooded enough, that was for sure.
But how did she do it? Could she be the tall woman the nurse saw leaving the building? Stephanie wasn’t anywhere near as tall as me, but some people thought five-nine was tall for a woman. The average American man is five-ten, and I’ve dated most of them. The average woman is five-three. By my standards that wasn’t
average, that was shrimp city. Stephanie had a good six inches on the average woman. She was tall.
Maybe she was smart, too, and got someone to do her dirty work for her. She could have hired a killer, the way she hired someone to clean her pool and mow her lawn.
All the way back to the office I kept running this theory through my mind. Stephanie seemed the type, and lord knows she had a motive. But the opportunity, that’s where my theory tripped up every time. Rich ladies didn’t just go to the Ladue Marketplace and pick up a killer-to-go. If she had a boyfriend, the police would have tumbled to it by now. They always looked for things like that. Besides, Babe would have told me. He picked up dirt like a Hoover. He knew when every Ladue woman screwed her yard boy, and he would have spread the word. No, I didn’t think Stephanie had talked a lover into killing her husband. So how did she get rid of the man, when she had hundreds of Junior League lunchers to swear she was eating lettuce when he was eating lead? Was she really that crafty? Or was she innocent? I wasn’t sure my interview with her had accomplished anything.
“Just what did you think you were doing, Francesca, badgering an innocent widow?” Charlie was literally spitting, he was so furious. The minute I walked into the Gazette, I’d been sent to his office.
Stephanie, may her facelift sag like a cheap suit, had called Charlie and turned on the waterworks. She said I’d come to her house of mourning and made horrible, horrible accusations about her poor dead husband, attacking his character when he couldn’t defend himself, and now I was going to print these awful accusations in the Gazette and ruin his reputation, and she would never be able to hold up her head again. Charlie was furious. He felt I’d embarrassed him in front of his society buddies. I could tell how mad he was by checking his bald spot. It turned red when he was angry. Now it was a dark blood color. That meant the Bald-O-Meter was off the charts.
“I did not make any accusations,” I said, but I sounded defensive. “All I did was ask her a few questions. The woman may be involved in the Doc in the Box murders.”