Rubout (22 page)

“Thank you for sharing, Francesca,” the consultant said. “We appreciate another point of view, which you certainly advocate with enthusiasm. It is important for our corporate culture to reflect the diversity of the community we serve and we hope to engender enthusiasm and purpose to sustain the excellence the
Gazette
name stands for. We think at our next meeting we will have an exercise that will help build a corporate consensus while fostering communication at all levels. Until then . . .”

“What’s he saying?” I asked Georgia, who can translate corporate-ese. Something was not quite right. The meeting was breaking up in a quiet that now seemed ominous. Everyone slipped out without saying anything. Georgia grabbed my elbow and steered me out the door and across the hall to the
women’s lounge. There was nobody sitting on the pale-green couches and the stalls were empty. Georgia hissed through clenched teeth, “They’re going to try to recover your damage at the next meeting. That’s what they’re saying. Here’s what I’m saying: When are you going to keep your big mouth shut?” Her eyes were narrowed and her skin was drawn tight across her small, elfin face. Uh-oh. She was too angry even to yell at me. She turned and walked out, leaving me standing there alone.

“Why did they ask for my opinion if they didn’t want it?” I said to the empty room. Jeez. Now my mentor was mad at me, too. I went off to cover a story. The only people I got along with lately were my readers.

A
man was following me in the park. I could hear his shoes on the blacktop path. I knew it was a man, even though I couldn’t see him. I wasn’t going to turn around and confront him. Not yet. It could be a neighbor out for a morning walk. The man wasn’t running fast enough to be a jogger. But he was walking briskly. Was it to keep up with me? Or was I just being paranoid? Tower Grove Park was fairly safe by day, but still, there had been problems.

I was being ridiculous. The whole reason I took this walk this morning was that I needed to relax, and now I was finding more reasons to worry. I definitely needed more exercise. I speeded up. So did the man behind me. I walked even faster, as if I could walk away from all my problems, at home and at work.

After the Voyage Committee fiasco—that’s what Georgia told me it was—I put in a long night. I interviewed a man who had a beer can collection. He was
a true fanatic, and under the right circumstances his devotion to thousands of metal cylinders would have been charming and eccentric. But I couldn’t make the column work. My words stumbled onto the computer screen, clumsy and graceless, and I was afraid I made the poor man look like a boring nutcase. Finally I gave up and sent the column in by modem after midnight, but I wasn’t happy with it. I was a failure, personally and professionally.

I decided the best thing to do was stay away from the paper this morning. I didn’t want to face an angry Georgia or a gloating Charlie. So I had breakfast at Uncle Bob’s—another reason I needed exercise—then called the office and said I was working on a story. I was, but not until around eleven. Scarlette wasn’t answering the phones and Wendy wasn’t at her desk. Good. I didn’t want to talk to either one. I left a message on the department answering machine.

It was a warm sunny day in late fall, with just a hint of chill underneath. It was the kind of day that made me sad because I knew there wouldn’t be many more like it this year. Soon the cold would close in for months and the days would be short and gray. But walking in the old Victorian park calmed me. The lily ponds and prettily painted gazebos had been there for more than a hundred years. The people who’d walked in the park a century ago had survived problems worse than mine. Their lives went on. Mine would, too.

I could still hear the man walking behind me, but I refused to turn around. This part of the winding path was edged with tall bushes and seemed deserted. I
was out of sight of the street. I walked a little faster. So did the walker. If he was going to give me trouble, this spot was ideal. As I topped the next hill, I felt better. The path was less curvy. Now it ran alongside Arsenal Street. I could see cars going by. A tired African American woman in a white uniform was waiting for a bus. A jogger passed me, a balding guy in his fifties who had either a big beer gut or the first case of male pregnancy. He was sweating earnestly. The flat-bellies ran between six and seven in the morning. I preferred the overweight joggers who struggled along later. I was never impressed by the early birds. They acted as if they were naturally virtuous because they woke up before the rest of us.

The man was still following me. I could hear his shoes scraping the walkway. Then I came into the park entrance off Arsenal and forgot all about him. The morning sun had turned the yellow-leaved gingko trees lining the drive a glorious gold. The sky was a pure blue. The colors were so lovely, I stopped dead. That’s when he caught me, the man who hurt me before and wanted to hurt me again. It was that no-good louse Lyle.

“Hi,” he said. “I’ve been trying to catch up with you for blocks. I even called your name, but you ignored me. I figured you were in one of your funks.”

He smiled his special smile. Crooked but cute. That was Lyle all right. His smile must have charmed that woman—no, that girl, that child—when she pawed him in O’Connell’s Pub, a place where he used to take me for lunch. How could Lyle neck with a blonde, right in front of my editor, Charlie? He knew Charlie was always looking for ways to knife me.
Naturally, Charlie picked the middle of the newsroom to announce Lyle had a little lunchmate. I was never so humiliated in my life. I was never less receptive to Lyle’s smile.

I smiled, too, but it wasn’t a very nice smile. “It’s chilly, Lyle. You might catch cold. You should have a warm student wrapped around your neck,” I said sarcastically.

“Francesca,” he said, “please don’t be this way. I’ve spent all morning looking for you. I went to Uncle Bob’s, and Marlene said you’d already left. I stopped by your place, and Mrs. Indelicato said she thought you were walking in the park.”

We were at the center drive, near a small gray gazebo. We must have looked like a Victorian painting, if you didn’t count my jeans and leather jacket. Lyle took one of my hands and clasped it tenderly. I didn’t take it back. I was angry, but I had to admit he looked good. He was wearing my favorite blue sweater, the same color as that heartbreaking sky.

“I missed you so much,” he said, his voice softening, and he took a step toward me. I missed him, too, but I didn’t let him get any closer.

“You missed me so much you were seen consoling yourself with a nineteen-year-old blonde at O’Connell’s,” I snapped. He stepped back, as if I might bite. Maybe I would.

“What was I supposed to do?” he said. “I asked you to marry me and you didn’t want me. You walked out on me. You left me.” He gave me a hurt look, like a puppy dog who had his paw stepped on.

“You didn’t waste any time finding someone else,” I said, yanking my hand back.

“So I took a student out to lunch.” He shrugged, as if he’d forgotten it and I should, too. It was one of his most irritating habits. He continued to explain away the nineteen-year-old blonde, as if words could erase her. “She’s not my student, anyway. She’s not in my class. But she is interested in writing. She’s nothing to me, although I admit it was nice to have someone hanging on my words, as if they meant something to her.”

“That isn’t all she was hanging on,” I said. “Charlie was there at the restaurant. He saw you. He told me about it in front of the entire newsroom.”

“That’s all you care about,” Lyle said, and now he was angry. “You don’t care about me. You aren’t upset that we broke up. All you care about is how it looked to Charlie. We’re back to your job again, aren’t we? It always comes back to that.”

We no longer looked like a charming Victorian painting. We looked like two angry people screaming at each other. “At least I can count on my job,” I yelled. “It’s there. It’s not running around with empty-headed young blondes.”

“Ashley isn’t empty-headed,” Lyle said firmly.

“Oh, it’s Ashley, is it?” I said. There was acid in my voice. “Every airhead I ever knew was named Ashley. I bet she has her own horse, and her daddy bought it for her.”

That stopped him. “How did you know that?” he said, sounding puzzled. Then he went back to being angry. His fair skin was starting to flush. “You know what I like about Ashley?”

“Her big tits?” I said sweetly.

That did it. Lyle was spitting mad. The cords in his
neck stood out. “You have a vulgar mind.” he said contemptuously. I knew he was furious because he lowered his voice to a deadly tone.

“It’s the secret of my success,” I said.

Lyle ignored me. “I like to go out with Ashley because it’s refreshing to be with someone who has no problems. I don’t have to listen to her agonize at three
A.M
. about her terrible childhood and her unfaithful father and her crazy mother. If I ask Ashley to marry me, she’ll give me an answer based on how much she loves me, not how much she hates her parents. She’s only nineteen, and she’s refreshing. She doesn’t follow me around, telling me the latest thing she did to Charlie and Charlie did to her. She doesn’t ask me what I think Charlie will do next, or badger me with endless questions about those wackos who run the
Gazette.
She doesn’t know anyone at the
Gazette.
She doesn’t even read the
Gazette.”

“She’s probably too young,” I said, and lowered my voice to a matching snarl. I said each word distinctly, as if I were pounding it into his thick skull. “I am sorry for what I said about Ashley. I’m sure she doesn’t have any problems. How could she? She hasn’t had a life yet. But you do have problems. Ashley is thirty years younger than you. You’re not dating. You’re child-molesting. That must be why you’re hanging around the park: You’re waiting to pick up more children.”

I left him standing there. He shouted something at me, but I wasn’t listening. Head high, I turned around and walked briskly out of the park. By the time I got home, I was sweating. Yep, that was sweat
in my eyes. I wasn’t going to waste my tears on the likes of Lyle.

Having confronted one male rat, I set off to find another. I was in just the right mood to deal with Hudson Vander Venter. That man had used his secretary to avoid me long enough. I was going to track him down and corner him in his parking garage until I had some answers. Hudson’s office was in one of the gleaming mirrored glass cubes that infested downtown Clayton. They made the suburban business district look like it was wearing mirrored sunglasses. I wondered about 1980s architecture. All those mirrored business towers, reflecting other people’s work. Couldn’t the architects come up with anything creative?

The lobby of Vander Venter’s office building had enough beige marble to build a small Roman amphitheater. The tropical plants could restock a rain forest. The brass elevator doors looked like they opened onto bank vaults—or maybe burial vaults. How warm and friendly. Just like Hudson. I found a pay phone back by the door to the parking garage. I fished a quarter out of my wallet and called Hudson’s office. His secretary said he was in a meeting until noon. Good. He was at the office. I hung up without leaving a message. I checked my watch. It was eleven-forty. I figured he would go to lunch somewhere around twelve. I walked into the parking garage and wandered up and down the ramps until I found the reserved spaces for Vander Venter and Associates on the orange level. There
H. VANDER VENTER
was stenciled in black on the wall. The sign was right over the hood of a huge black BMW, the kind of car
that Darth Vader would drive if he wore business suits. It had been hand-polished to a frightening gloss. I could see my face in this dark mirror. I fixed my hair and then leaned against a concrete pillar to wait for Hudson.

I waited about half an hour. Security never came around once. At twelve-twelve, Hudson stepped out of the parking garage elevator. He was smaller than he looked in his pictures, and his skin was tanned the rich bronze of club-car leather. His quiet gray suit shouted money. It was a beautiful match with his steel-gray hair. His steely eyes were mean and hard. His shoes were as black and polished as his car. A black nylon gym bag completed the ensemble. He looked powerful and bored. He seemed to walk inside a capsule of dead air.

“Mr. Vander Venter?” I said quietly, walking toward him.

His eyes flicked over me briefly, then dismissed me as someone who was not important. He looked around the parking garage, possibly for a minion to remove me. We could hear doors slamming and cars starting up in other areas. But no one was near us. Hudson ignored me and kept walking toward his car. I blocked his path.

“I’m Francesca Vierling with the
City Gazette”
I said. “I’m very sorry about your wife’s death.”

He nudged me out of his way and kept walking to his car. I followed. “I hate to bother you here, but I couldn’t get through to you at your office. I need to ask you a few questions about your late wife. Do you have any theories about who might have killed her?”