Rubout

Many thanks to the people who helped me with this book, from Ladue to South St. Louis and across the U.S.A.

They include Pat and Roseann Brannon of the St. Louis Casa Loma Ballroom, Richard Buthod, Susan Carlson, Dean Engledow of Iron Horse Taming, Tom Finan, Jinny Gender, Gerald Greiman, Jane Gilbert, Kay Gordy, Karen Grace, Esley Hamilton, Debbie Henson, the Kirkwood HOGs, Marilyn Koehr, Cindy Lane, Robert Levine, Betty and Paul Mattli, Sharon Morgan, Donna O’Toole, Dick Richmond, St. Louis Police Officer Barry Lalumandier, the staff of the St. Louis Public Library, Janet Smith, Ron and Pat Steger, and Anne Watts, who has an amazing mind for murder.

Finally, thanks to all those folks who must remain anonymous, including several divorced women and my favorite pathologist.

“S
o, do you think the boots are too much?”

Lyle, the man I semi live in sin with, looked at the black Italian suede boots that went almost to my thighs. Where they stopped, a pair of skintight black leather pants took over. Im six feet tall, so I was covered by a lot of cow. The outfit was finished off by a silver chain belt and a black blouse. Lyle’s expression was somewhere between lust and disgust.

“Is that a joke?” the professorial Lyle asked.

We certainly didn’t go together. In fact, that was the problem tonight. We weren’t going together. He was wearing a wheat-colored lamb’s wool sweater, khaki pants, and some fancy German walking shoes, although he wasn’t walking. His feet were propped on a leather hassock in front of the gray slate fireplace in his West End town house. A pale shot of single-malt scotch in a crystal rocks glass complemented the ensemble. On his lap was the latest
New
Yorker.
He had settled in for the evening, and he was going to spend it without me. I thought I’d zing him a little.

“Where I’m going,” I said, subtly reminding him I’d be parading around in this outrageous outfit alone, while he sat home, “this is as conservative as a white satin formal and twelve-button gloves.”

I was heading for the Leather and Lace Bikers’ Society Ball, the most exclusive social event in St. Louis—if you’re a biker. I’d finagled a ticket, and it wasn’t easy, even for a columnist at the
St. Louis City Gazette.
Tickets are restricted to keep out sightseers and RUBs—rich urban bikers—and keep the dance for the real Harley riders. I’ve always had a thing about Harleys, but then again, I like anything fast. That’s why I drive a blue Jaguar X-JS. It shocks the heck out of my colleagues at the
City Gazette.
They think female newspaper reporters should dress like rumpled nuns, male reporters should drink like Mike Royko, and both sexes should drone on in news stories like they’re writing a doctoral thesis. Oops. I didn’t mean to knock all professors. Just one. I was peeved at Lyle, and I guess it showed. I wanted him to go with me to the biker ball, and he refused.

“It’s not really my scene, Francesca,” he said. “Never play another man’s game.”

Lately Lyle didn’t seem to be playing any games at all. I didn’t want to go to the ball alone. This outfit should have raised the dead, but it couldn’t even get Lyle up off his chair. Well, I was too proud to beg. But I’d been going to too many events by myself recently because Lyle didn’t want to bestir himself. I’d
begun to wonder if maybe I’d be better off alone, without Lyle.

“I’m leaving,” I said. “Good night.”

“Have a good time,” he said absently, already deep in his magazine.

“I’ll make sure,” I promised, and slammed the door. The damp rainy night stuck cold fingers down my collar the minute I stepped out the door. I shivered as I unlocked Ralph, my blue Jag, and waited for his engine to purr. The sleek car was named for my favorite old-time sitcom character, Ralph Kramden, of
The Honeymooners.
Neither Ralph seemed to mind. Lyle’s neighborhood, the Central West End, was supposed to be the most beautiful part of St. Louis. Maybe it had the grandest houses. But I was headed for South St. Louis, where I felt most at home. There, the air smelled of city smog and beer, and the houses had more recliners than a Sears showroom. It looked especially romantic on a rainy November Saturday night. I passed rows of redbrick flats, silvered by the streetlights and glistening in the rain. The windows were warm with light. Evidently, even my section of the city agreed with Lyle—it was a good night to stay in.

Until I got to Iowa Street. That’s when I saw the traffic for the biker ball: a line of shiny pickups, sedans, and stretch limos letting off passengers in front of the Casa Loma Ballroom. There were even a couple dozen bikes at this biker ball. It wasn’t a good night to ride, especially if you planned to drink and party. As the bikers hurried inside, wrapped in coats and rain gear, I caught interesting glimpses of black leather, chains, stretch lace, and skin. By the time I
pulled into the Casa Loma parking lot, I’d quit brooding on my lagging love life. There was too much happening here.

The Casa Loma was a city success story. The seventy-year-old ballroom used to host the best of the big bands. Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman played there. A young and skinny Frank Sinatra sang there, and so did Bill Haley and the Comets. You’d never guess that by looking at the outside. It was one more slightly dingy brick building. What made it spectacular was the ballroom on the second floor. The dance floor was five thousand square feet of mellow, polished wood cushioned by rubber. A floor like that turned every couple into a light-footed Fred and Ginger. The balconied ballroom, with its clean, sweeping lines, looked like an ocean liner in an old movie. The Casa Loma had been slated for destruction in 1990. But it was saved by those who loved it. Two ballroom dancers, Pat and Roseann Brannon, took it over. Now the Brannons had ballroom dancing on Friday nights. Some Casa Loma couples had had the same table for forty years. They brought their dance shoes in bags, for real ballroom dancers’ shoes never touched a sidewalk. Saturday night dances were usually devoted to rock, Latin, or Mexican music. St. Louis has a large, loyal Hispanic population, and whole families, from grandparents to little kids, would go to the Casa Loma in their best dancing clothes. Other nights there were proms or private parties. And one night a year there was the Leather and Lace Ball.

As I walked in the door, I was hit with a blast of sound from the band, the King of Hearts. It was a
solid wall of rock. I saw four guys in leather wrestling a seven-hundred-pound black-and-chrome Harley up the ballroom steps. “Easy, now, easy. Almost there,” said a Harley wrestler in a leather biker cap with a chain headband, leather vest, and barrel chest. That was Sonny, head honcho of the South Side HOGs. HOG is short for Harley Owners Group. I waved and headed up to see him. Sonny got me into the ball, and I owed him a thank you. The Harley was now resting at the top of the stairs. So was Sonny. He was drinking Busch from the bottle. “Nice outfit,” he said, taking a swig from his beer.

“Nice Harley,” I returned politely.

“It’s the centerpiece for the ball,” he said.

“Sure beats flowers and balloons for decorations, ” I said.

I’d seen plenty of those. In fact, I’d been to so-called charity balls where most of the money was spent on decorations. The bikers raised more money at their events than some charity balls that got kid-glove treatment in the paper. I’d had to cover my share of society events as a young
CG
reporter, and I hated them. The two worst, at least for me, were the Veiled Prophet and the Fleur de Lis balls, where St. Louis society made their debuts. The Fleur de Lis was the Catholic coming-out ball, and when I covered it fifteen years ago, rumor had it that the rich doctors and car dealers paid twenty thousand bucks for their daughters to bow before the cardinal. I was raised Catholic, but I lost what few shreds of religion I had when I heard the old gray cardinal tell the ballroom, “You are the backbone of the church.” I thought of my grandmother and her friends, working
the St. Philomena’s bake sales until their feet hurt, to make two hundred dollars for the church. The cardinal had just wiped out their hard labor in favor of some guys who uncapped a pen. The cardinal must have forgotten that part in the Gospel about the widow’s mite.

The Veiled Prophet Ball was even weirder. This was supposed to be for the richest and most powerful families in the city. The Veiled Prophet was always an old white corporate guy who wore robes and covered his noggin with a funny-looking crowned veil. But nobody laughed at this getup. Young society women in white dresses actually had to bow down before him. Not just bow—prostrate themselves on the floor. Would you let your daughter do that? You didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see the symbolism. Especially when the sons didn’t bow. To me, it looked like the rich families were saying they were willing to sacrifice their daughters to money and power. I thought being rich meant you didn’t bow down to anyone, but Lyle, who had family money, said I missed the point. He didn’t go to either ball, by the way.

The Veiled Prophet was weird from a news standpoint too. The
Gazette
never printed the name of the Veiled Prophet. Anyone who was anyone claimed to know who the veiled bigwig was, and Babe, our gossip columnist, always came back from the ball and told his friends. The VP’s name was supposed to be a secret from us little people. To know his name was a sign you belonged to the city’s ruling class. At a features meeting, I told our then managing editor, Hadley Harris III, we should print the Veiled Prophet’s
name. He was as shocked as if I’d wanted to run nude photos of the Prophet’s Queen of Love and Beauty.

“We have a city tradition to maintain,” Hadley said firmly, “and we will uphold it.”

I thought it wasn’t a tradition. It was a promise in writing that the
Gazette
wouldn’t name the Veiled Prophet—and would extend the same courtesy to the area’s white ruling class. The old boys could make their backroom deals without accountability. The paper’s first loyalty was to the city establishment. The top editors all went to the Veiled Prophet Ball. Even the publisher, who lived most of the time in Boston, flew in to attend the silly thing.

The only ball I wanted to go to was the biker’s society ball, and it was much harder to get in to. In biker circles, it didn’t matter how important your dead relatives were. Money wouldn’t help either. In fact, it might hurt. This society was based on skill. If you could handle a bike, you were admired. Tickets to the Leather and Lace Ball were twelve dollars. But you could buy them only at a HOG chapter meeting or a Harley dealer, and you had to act quickly. The thousand tickets were gone in two days. After that, Sonny had been offered a hundred dollars for a ticket to the ball. He always said no.