Rubout (26 page)

Nowadays very few people made brains at home, but you could still get them at a handful of bars. Dieckmeyer’s was an old family restaurant that was famous for its brains. It was decorated like your living room, if your living room had tables for four and a long bar, and it was probably cleaner than your house. Bud Dieckmeyer had died a few years ago, but his wife, Lorraine, and their children, Nancy and John, ran the place in the old tradition. Now poor Arnold from Ohio was going to eat his first brain,
and because he didn’t get them as a kid, he was going to have to think about what he was doing.

Arnold turned out to be a nice lad in his mid-twenties who had his head shaved and an earring in one ear. He’d convinced himself that he was tough. He was going to eat a brain sandwich, and so what? No big deal. He downed a beer to keep up his courage. Debbie and Sonny had matching grins on their faces. They were enjoying this. They both wore black Harley T-shirts and drank beer out of the bottle, biker style. Bikers don’t like draft beer.

Finally the sandwich arrived. Plopped on two pieces of rye bread was something that looked like a brain, except it was covered with golden breading. You could see all the furrows and ridges. You could practically hear that sandwich think. Arnold turned a delicate shade of green.

“Er,” he said. “It sure looks fried.”

“Taste it,” we said, sitting there like a pack of ghouls, waiting for him to take a bite.

“Sure. Sure. Let’s let it cool off a bit first,” Arnold said.

“Oh, you don’t want to eat cold brains,” said Sonny.

“That’s not smart,” Debbie said, laughing.

Arnold turned even greener. With the ketchup bottle in one hand, he was starting to look like a Christmas display, except he wasn’t very festive. He poured ketchup on the sandwich until it looked like an accident scene. “Right,” he said. “Bite. Just don’t think about it.”

“Its thinking days are done,” said Sonny, who was enjoying this hugely. “Brains are food for thought.”

Arnold couldn’t stomach any more of Sonny’s awful puns. He closed his eyes and took a big bite, then chewed slowly. “Not bad,” he said, his voice quavering.

“What’s it taste like?” we asked. Everyone has a different description.

“Sort of like a liver soufflé,” the kid replied.

“Here, gimme that,” Sonny said, putting Arnold out of his misery. “Brains are scarce these days. They shouldn’t be wasted on someone who doesn’t appreciate them.” He smiled. “You’re all right, Arnold. Most people aren’t as brave as you. We’ll take it from here. Get yourself something else.”

Sonny and Debbie divided up the sandwich. Arnold, manhood confirmed, happily ordered a hamburger, which came from a cow, too, but wasn’t so obvious about it. I had Lorraine’s chicken and dumplings. While we ate, Sonny and Debbie told us stories about some of the one-percenters, the outlaw bikers, that were making the rounds.

“One of these guys was going with the ex-girlfriend of a Saddle Tramp,” Sonny began.

“That’s a biker gang, like the Hell’s Angels,” Debbie explained to Arnold.

“The ex-boyfriend put out a contract on the new one,” Sonny continued. “The new boyfriend started carrying two or three guns in his saddlebags. Then he realized he might not be able to get to them in time. So he started wearing three sticks of dynamite on his chest. He figured if they got him, he was going to take them with him. So far as I know, he’s still riding around with the dynamite strapped to himself.”

“What’s his bike look like?” I asked. “There are a lot of potholes on the streets these days. My luck, I’ll be the car behind him.”

“You don’t have anything to worry about in your Jag,” he said. “That car is built like a tank.”

By the time we ordered apple pie, Sonny was telling us “All these one-percenters got girlfriends, along with the wife. I know one who leaves his wife at home and takes his girlfriend along on long trips. She sleeps in the weeds on the side of the road with him. These are not rich guys. They don’t have money for hotels.”

“Was the girlfriend hot-looking?” Arnold asked. If he expected a romantic biker babe, Sonny took care of that notion.

“Skinny as a drowned rat,” he said. “That beer bottle’s got a lot of meat on it compared to her calves.” Arnold looked respectfully at the beer bottle, as if it were one of the players in this drama.

“Didn’t his wife ride?” I asked.

“She used to,” Sonny said. “Then a couple of friends got in a bad accident and she got scared. But this girlfriend and wife business gets interesting. I heard about the biker woman whose husband roughed her up once too often. She called her boyfriend and told him, ‘You get over here and do something.’ Then she took a shower. While she was in the shower, her boyfriend came over. When her husband answered the door, the boyfriend blew him away.”

“That’s doing something, all right,” Debbie said. “Tell her about the Saddle Tramp’s funeral.”

“One of the Saddle Tramps got killed,” Sonny said. “It was a foggy night, and he and his girlfriend were
out riding on one of those country highways. His bike quit, just like that, in the middle of the road, and he was rear-ended by a car. He got killed and his girlfriend wound up in a wheelchair. We went to the funeral. It was weird. There was his wife, talking about what a fine Christian man he was, and there was his girlfriend in the wheelchair, sitting right there. About half the funeral was outside. Those were the local biker crowd. Inside were all his wife’s churchgoing friends. It was like two funerals in one.”

“I’ll tell you, if my husband died with his girlfriend, you’d have to send me pictures of the funeral, because I wouldn’t be there,” Debbie said, but the way she looked at Sonny you knew there was no chance of that. They’d ridden thousands of miles together and got along fine. They’d even been to Sturgis, the wild summer party of the biker world. “Biggest danger there at Sturgis is getting drunk and passing out and getting run over, or having a drunken biker run over you when you’re asleep. I know guys who got their arms and legs broken that way.”

“You ever ride anything but a Harley?” I asked.

“I had a Jap cycle before I knew better,” Sonny said. “Now I don’t ride anything but Harleys. It’s almost like I’d be committing adultery if I rode anything else. Except that adultery might be fun, and riding anything but a Harley wouldn’t.”

Debbie threw him a glare that should have peeled the Harley emblem off his black shirt, but he just laughed at her and rubbed her shoulders. “You know I’m just talking, baby.”

“You better be,” she said.

He grinned his rabid chipmunk grin. Then he got
serious. “The working man is getting priced out of the Harley world. It’s getting to be a real issue for us. Harley approached money people like Malcolm Forbes about riding Harleys, and it set the stage for people of means to buy them. Harleys are a good investment. You can’t lose—the price always goes up. When the money people got involved, the prices really went up. Now the waiting list for a new Harley is one year, and regular working guys have trouble affording them. If you have three kids to feed, it’s hard to justify twenty thousand dollars for something for yourself.”

Sonny’s speech gave me the opening I needed. “I think that’s why Jack tried to sell me the name of Sydney’s killer—he wanted to pay his bills before he lost his motorcycle,” I said.

Sonny looked surprised. “He tried to sell you the name? Jack? He must have been really hard up.”

“He never was too bright,” Debbie said, “but I didn’t think he’d do something like that.”

I told them the whole story, and how I didn’t believe him and how he was found dead on a back road in Illinois and why I thought he might have been doing some dirty work for Hudson Vander Venter.

“How’s he going to meet Hudson Vander Venter?” Sonny said. “Show up at one of their black-tie parties? Invest with his firm? No way they’d know each other.”

“This is St. Louis, Sonny,” I said. “Everybody knows everybody else if you dig deep enough.”

“Get out your shovel then,” Sonny said. “But I don’t think there’s a connection.”

“Let’s start with the son, who’s now living in Richmond
Heights,” I said. “Do you think Jack would know Hud?”

“I don’t think so. How would he know Hud?”

“The kid has—or had—a drug problem,” I said. “Jack ever sell anything?”

“A little,” Sonny said. “Only to friends. He wouldn’t sell to a Ladue kid. That’s asking for trouble.”

“Did he ever work for the father, Hudson?”

“At the investment house?” Sonny said. “Are you kidding?”

“Did Jack ever do any handyman work, carpentry, lawn mowing, leaf raking, brush cutting?”

“Not if he could help it,” Sonny said. “And not in Ladue. They wouldn’t let someone like Jack ride around in Ladue. The police would chase him out, the way he looked. He couldn’t go near the Vander Venters on a Harley.”

“What about a pickup truck?” I said.

“He might,” Sonny said. “Except Jack didn’t have one. Might have borrowed his brother’s pickup.”

“I didn’t know he had a brother in St. Louis,” I said.

“He doesn’t. He has a brother in Washington, Missouri. You’d never guess him and Jack came from the same gene pool. His brother Eddie is a good Christian man. He never drinks, never smokes, works hard. He has steady habits and he’s very trustworthy. Eddie does a lot of work for the rich St. Louisans who have farms and weekend places around there. Those rich folks guard his name and phone number like it was the family jewels. Keep him loaded with work. Sometimes, if he got really busy, he’d ask Jack to come down and help him out. Offer him good
money, too. Jack did it a few times and then he stopped.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure,” Sonny said. “There may have been some kind of trouble like something missing at one of the houses, or clearing brush may have been more work than Jack wanted to do. I just know he did it for a while, and then he quit.”

We were close. I knew it. I just had to ask the right question. “The Vander Venters have a farm out that way,” I said. “Did Eddie work for them? Did he ever have Jack help out around their farm?”

“Might have,” Sonny said. “Wait a minute. I remember something. Yes, yes, Jack did some work for his brother on the Vander Venter farm. I remember now. I don’t think it lasted very long, but Jack sure bragged about it.”

“He bragged about working for the Vander Venters?” This didn’t sound like the Jack I knew.

“Nope,” Sonny said. “He bragged about
not
working. About how he took the money, sat around and drank beer, and did next to nothing. Got eight dollars an hour for it. He didn’t talk about it until after he took up with Sydney. Then he told us about it. I remembered what he said, too: Now he’d screwed both Vander Venters.”

Finally I had the information I wanted. I’d established the first connection. Jack knew Hudson. Tomorrow, when I saw Hudson’s mother, I’d try to find out just how well Hudson knew him and what other work Jack did for him. And if they were in contact
during that fifteen minutes Hudson couldn’t account for the night of his wife’s death.

I thanked Sonny and Debbie and congratulated Arnold on his successful introduction to St. Louis brains. I was so elated, I picked up the whole check, which wasn’t that big, anyway, even for a
Gazette
expense account. It was nine-thirty when I got home. There were no spots in front, so I parked Ralph in back and went up the back stairs. I’d barely dropped my briefcase by the door when I heard the doorbell ring.

I wondered if it was Mayhew, returning. I wondered if I could look him in the eye. I blushed again just thinking about our encounter. What would it do to our friendship? My front door was a big panel of beveled glass, set in a wooden door. Like all proper South Side households, it was covered with a sheer white curtain. If we South Siders stood at the top of the steps and didn’t turn on the stairway light, we could get a pretty good idea who was standing at our door.

I studied the form. It was a man, taller than I, and he had a bunch of flowers in one hand. It wasn’t Mayhew. It was Lyle. I was in no mood for him right now. I ran down the steps, prepared to send him and his flowers packing.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “I’m too old for you.”

“Shhh. Shhhh,” he said, as if he were quieting a child. Lyle folded me in his arms. “I’m sorry. So sorry this ever happened. It was so unnecessary. I know how much you love your grandparents. I’d never
want you to give up their place. I just want you with me as much as possible.”

I started to cry, but I didn’t want him to see me. “What happened to Ashley?” I said, sniffing.

“She talks about her horse Pumpkin and her cat Pookie and she complains constantly about how her roommate doesn’t clean up,” he said. “She spent thirty minutes telling me how her roommate hung a wet towel over the shower curtain and it will mildew if she keeps that up. She also said my wardrobe was too-old and I dressed like her dad. There’s a good reason why I dress like her dad. I found out I’m three years older than her dad.”

I snickered. I couldn’t help it. I don’t think Lyle heard. He kept talking and stroking my hair. “She wanted me to wear an Armani suit. I told her I’d look like a gunsel. She didn’t know what a gunsel was. Every morning she read me my horoscope and actually believed it. It was the only thing she read in the
Gazette.
She said Bosnia was boring.