Doc in the Box E-Book

Elaine Viets

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: A Francesca Vierling Mystery
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 337

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

From Anthony and Agatha Award-winning author of the Dead-End Job mysteries—a gritty series featuring a no-nonsense female journalist who follows her stories wherever they may lead…especially if they lead to big trouble. Columnist Francesca Vierling thought she had it tough dealing with the cutthroat office politics at the St. Louis City Gazette. But stressors in the newsroom reach new heights when her dear mentor Georgia is diagnosed with cancer and Francesca offers to hide her illness from their boorish boss. When Francesca goes to pick up Georgia from treatment, she is horrified to find the staff shot dead and a distraught Georgia the only survivor. The crime is bloody, shocking, sensational—and just the kind of story that would allow Francesca to break free from her oppressive employers. All she has to do is solve the crime. The story quickly grows out of control when a doctor is killed in the same building as the massacre. And then another. And another… Because the killer isn't just out for blood—they're out for revenge. And Francesca is about to get in their way… Note: The author has made some minor revisions to the original text for this edition of the book.

Leseprobe

Doc in the Box

Copyright © Elaine Viets, 2000

Originally published by Dell, 2000

Published as an eBook in in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

All rights reserved

eISBN: 978-1-625673-46-6

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Triggers & Sparks

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Epilogue

About the Author

Also by Elaine Viets

To Don, who researched this book the hard way

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to my agent, David Hendin, who’s still the best.

To my editor, Mitch Hoffman.

To the staff of the St. Louis Public Library, and to Anne Watts, who has given me some deadly accurate ideas. Also, to the staff of the Broward County Library. Librarians are the next best thing to moms for knowing everything.

Many other people in St. Louis and around the country helped me with this book. I hope I’ve acknowledged them all. I certainly appreciate their help.

Barry Berry, retired St. Louis Police commander, veteran detective, and commander of the Police Academy. Diane Earhart, Jinny Gender, Kathy Gender, Lisa Gender, Kay Gordy, Karen Grace, Willetta L. Heising, author of “Detecting Women.” Debbie Henson, Lt. Kathy Katerman, North Miami Beach Police. Marilyn Koehr, Cindy Lane, Betty Mattli, Paul Mattli, the ever-hip Alan Portman and Molly Portman. Dick Richmond, Janet Smith, John Spera, Sarah Watts, Julianna Yonan.

Finally, thanks to all those sources who must remain anonymous, including my favorite pathologist.

CHAPTER 1

Jack was buttoning up his shirt. I stared at his upper chest, a slab of tanned and toned muscle. As he tucked in his shirttail, I admired that rippling washboard stomach once more, and imagined those muscles moving the way I saw them last night. My mind wandered to other visions now concealed by his pants. Those strong legs and hot buns and …

“So, was I good?” he asked, combing his hair with his fingers. He didn’t wait for me to answer. He knew he was. He was the sort of man who made women howl and claw his hide.

“Got any hair spray I can borrow?” he said.

“Nope, never use it,” I said. That wasn’t quite true, but if you let him, the guy borrowed more stuff than a sorority roommate. He’d already used my powder compact, my teasing comb, and my pink lipstick to make his heart-stopping lips more luscious. He used his own eyeliner, though. I don’t lend that out. I wasn’t taking a chance of getting pinkeye from the handsome Jack.

I shifted on my lopsided chair in the men’s dressing room at the Heart’s Desire, a strip club ten minutes across the river from downtown St. Louis. We like to go across the Mississippi River into Illinois for our sin. That way we can pretend we really don’t have it in our city. But we keep it close to home.

Jack Hogenbaum, a.k.a. “Leo D. Nardo, Your Titanic Lover,” was the star of Ladies’ Nights at the club. He’d been packing them in since the movie. He looked like Leonardo DiCaprio. Well, sort of. At least his brown hair hung down over his forehead on the left side, he had soulful eyes, and when he danced, he could do stuff with a life preserver you never dreamed.

It was my job to follow him around for a day. My name is Francesca Vierling, and I’m a columnist for the St. Louis City Gazette. I’m six feet tall, dark hair, smart mouth. I’m generally in trouble with the newspaper management, but this last punishment from my sleazy managing editor had turned into an unexpected pleasure. Charlie, who was slime in a suit, had ordered me to do a story about “a day in the life of a stripper on the East Side. Human interest, you know.”

Humans were a species Charlie knew very little about. He was sure he’d make me furious with this porky assignment. But he never said which stripper I should follow. So I did a day in the life of a male stripper, Leo D. Nardo. So far I’d managed to extend this assignment to two days, for a real in-depth look. Last night I watched the show with the women in the audience. Tonight, I was backstage with Leo.

The club had that down-at-heels look you find backstage everywhere. The men’s dressing room had a big silver star on the door, but the door was covered with dirty handprints. The room smelled of Lysol and stale cigarette smoke, and the walls were painted an evil yellow. There were two stained sinks, a wall mirror losing its silvering, and a cigarette-burned countertop littered with more makeup than Dolly Parton’s dressing table. A scuffed black swinging door led to the shower and stalls. I stayed in the dressing room, which was fetchingly decorated with prime beefcake. Officer Friendly, an arresting male dancer in a break-apart police uniform, was applying eyeliner in front of the glaringly lit mirror. He danced before Leo, getting the women warmed up for the star.

Leo was dressing for his eight o’clock show. He’d shown up at seven-ten, wearing a sleazy purple mesh muscle shirt cut so low it barely covered his nipples, and tight jeans with a big bulge in front. I figured he must have stuffed half his sock drawer in there. He was carrying a freshly dry-cleaned sailor suit. It was the break-apart costume for his act. Leo hung it carefully on a nail in the wall, right over his glitter-covered life preserver that had “Titanic” spelled out in dark blue sequins. Then he stripped off his shirt and pants while I interviewed him. He looked casual and comfortable taking off his clothes. I felt overdressed in my black Donna Karan suit. I was glad I was sitting down, even on that hard molded plastic chair. I wasn’t used to carrying on conversations with men who wore only a well-filled G-string with “Titanic” on the front. It looked like the guy didn’t lie, either, unless he was wearing the male equivalent of the WonderBra. My mind skittered away from awful puns about going down on the Titanic. I couldn’t print them, anyway.

Any other man would have been embarrassed taking off his clothes and putting on makeup, but not Leo. He just got naked naturally. That was part of his charm. He didn’t strut, although he had plenty of reason to. I could feel a blush creeping up my neck. Damn. I wanted so badly to be hard-boiled, but I couldn’t escape twelve years of Catholic schools. The nuns got me, no matter how hard I tried to be cool. And this was an occasion of sin, if I ever saw one. Impure thoughts buzzed pleasantly in my brain. I was going to hell. Oh, well. Might as well enjoy perdition. I got hold of myself, since I didn’t have the nerve to get hold of Leo. I tuned into what he was saying.

“…  and while I don’t want to say it’s every guy’s dream to take off his clothes in front of a lot of women, it’s by no means a boring job.” Good quote. I wrote it down on my clipboard. I never used a reporter’s notebook, which looked like a skinny steno pad. I’m a big woman, and I like something I can hold. Argghh. That sounded wrong, too. I had to get those raging hormones under control.

Leo’s next action didn’t help. He rummaged in the clutter on the dressing table for a bottle of baby oil, and began oiling his golden brown chest and arms. They were smooth, hard, and hairless. I wondered if he shaved them. I could definitely see he worked out, but he didn’t have a rubbery overmuscled weight-lifter’s body, the kind with the veins sticking out on his neck and arms. I’d never known any woman who found those overdeveloped hard bodies attractive. Leo’s muscles were well-defined, but not bulging. He slathered more oil on a perky pec and said, “I do this because the women like it.”

Amen, brother, I thought. But I wrote that down, too.

“Did you pump up?” Officer Friendly asked him, as he used a Q-Tip to flick away a stray bit of mascara. Officer Friendly had light eyelashes he was trying to darken. I wondered if he knew he could dye them, but before I could say anything, I heard sirens. That was Officer Friendly’s cue to go onstage. He grabbed his nightstick and ran out the door.

Leo dropped to the floor like he was in basic training and began doing pushups. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. The man wasn’t winded. He didn’t even break a sweat. “I pump up my chest and arms to give me a full feeling effect in my body,” he said solemnly. I wasn’t sure what he meant. His body looked the same to me. He jumped up and pulled the plastic off his sailor suit. He showed me the Velcro fastenings that let him smoothly fling it off.

“Why do you wear that?” I said. “In the movie, Leonardo didn’t wear a sailor suit.”

“His real movie costumes weren’t very interesting,” Leo said. “I mean, I could either wear his clunky poor guy’s clothes, or a tux. Boring. Besides, women like a man in uniform.”

“They sure do,” I said. “I saw the way they were grabbing for you last night.” He’d been in grave danger of losing the Titanic, and it wouldn’t have hit an iceberg.

“I try to enforce the rules,” he said, batting his mascaraed eyelashes sincerely. “The women give me a tip on the hip and then I give them a kiss on the hand or something. I try to keep it as clean as possible, but sometimes you have to say, watch that. That’s all part of the fun.”

“So what did you do the night this place was raided?” I thought it was time to remind Leo he stripped for a living. The Heart’s Desire had been raided last December. Four dancers were arrested for lewd and indecent conduct, and a lot of women customers were mighty embarrassed. All charges were dropped later.

“During the raid, I was able to escape out the back door,” he said, looking me straight in the eye like a good liar. I saw the cash Leo had pulled in last night. I wondered how many cops he’d had to pay off.

“Does your mother know you do this?”

He looked hurt, and I felt like a rat for asking. But I was supposed to be a reporter, not an adoring fan. “She didn’t for a long time, but I finally had to tell her after the raid. She seemed to take it pretty positively.”

“So what are you going to be when you grow up, Leo? Are you going to college?”

“I’m not really college material,” he said. Right. He looked like he was solid Kryptonite. “I flunked out of Forest Park.”

That took some work. The local community college wasn’t exactly Harvard.

“I don’t want to do this forever,” he said. “It’s a business. I know I have a shelf life, and it’s coming to an end soon. I’m thirty years old. I’m finding gray hairs and fighting a gut already. I’d like to find some nice woman who’d take care of me. We could settle down, maybe have a family if she wants. I’m not really interested in a business career.”

“Are you kidding? You could do sales. You’d be a huge success.” I wished my eyes didn’t slide downward at the word huge. I wished he’d put on his sailor pants. He did.

“Wrong,” he said. “I tried it. I was bad. I couldn’t stand the rejection. Office work bores me. I can’t sit at a desk all day.”

I couldn’t imagine Leo keeping his clothes on for eight hours at a stretch, either.

“But I wouldn’t mind if she had a career. I wouldn’t feel threatened by her success or anything,” he said earnestly. “I’d enjoy taking care of her house while she went to work. I could cook dinner for her and clean and run errands. You know, pick up the dry cleaning and grocery shop for her.” Amazing. Inside this stud muffin was a perfect 1950s wife, waiting to get out.

But instead of tying on his June Cleaver apron, he slipped on his flexible dancing shoes, then slipped them off several times. “Testing,” the Titanic Lover said, with that iceberg-melting smile. “Sometimes the shoes are a little too tight and you can’t get them off.”

The first notes of the Titanic theme drifted through the door. Leo took one more look in the mirror and liked what he saw. “Time to go to work.” Pumped and primped, Leo grabbed his glittering life preserver and ran out onstage. I followed, hanging back in the wings to watch. That’s what I do as a newspaper columnist. I watch, while other people live their lives. The world was a show put on for my benefit, and most of the time, I was entertained. Now I was fascinated by how the women started screaming the minute he stepped onstage. It reminded me of those old videos of Beatles concerts. They were screaming so loud I could hardly hear the souped-up version of “My Heart Will Go On.” If he looked good in the dressing room, he looked even better onstage. Stage was too grand a word for where Leo performed. It was a raised black plywood platform that in daylight showed every nick and scuff. But now it looked like a pedestal for a bronze god. The strobe lights on his white uniform were dazzling.

Sturdy chrome railings kept the fans at bay, and burly bare-chested guys wearing tight shorts and black bow ties kept the more athletic women from climbing over. But there was plenty of room for their hands to stretch out and wave those bills. Women are supposed to be poor tippers, but I saw fives, tens, and even twenty-dollar bills flapping in the breeze. But Leo knew how to play hard to get. He didn’t go for the money right away. First he displayed the goods, that bronze body in the form-fitting sailor suit. Then, the music switched to one of those fast, thumpy songs with about seven words (I wanna, shake your booty, sex, body) that you hear in aerobics classes, and Leo ripped off his shirt with two hands. He made the gesture look powerful, like he was ripping a phone book in half. A nimble, dark-haired woman grabbed for the shirt. Leo artfully yanked it out of her hands—he’d told me he’d lost more than one custom-tailored costume that way—and flung it over his shoulder into the backstage safety zone. Then he gyrated, naked from the waist up. The women yowled like love-struck alley cats.

Their enthusiasm was touching. I’d seen female strippers at work, and the primary emotion for the women dancers and their male patrons was boredom. As the female strippers danced, you could almost feel their contempt for any man dumb enough to watch them. The men seemed equally contemptuous of any woman who would take off her clothes for them. The men nursed their watered drinks and stared blankly at the women, who went through the motions like badly made robots. This club had a split personality. Its Ladies’ Nights with Leo and the other male dancers were high-energy events. The rest of the time, it had listless female strippers.

There was a kind of innocence to Leo and these women. He seemed so eager to please, and they … well, they were definitely pleased. If they were screaming over his looks, think what they’d do if they knew he wanted to cook and keep house for a working woman. I supposed that was his delicate way of saying he’d stay home and she’d be the breadwinner. Plenty of women my mother’s age made that bargain in reverse with a man, and I knew lots of overworked women now who’d be happy to have their own deal with a hunky homemaker. I considered it myself. What would it be like to have the little man waiting for you at the door with your slippers and a dry martini, when you got home from the corporate wars? “How was your day, dear?” he’d say. “Dinner will be ready in five minutes.”

Leo could put the sailor act in dry dock—being waited on by a handsome man was every woman’s real fantasy. The Poplar Street Bridge would be jammed with women heading to the Heart’s Desire to propose to Leo. I wondered if I could be happy with him. He was easy on the eyes. He’d never tax my brain, either. What would we talk about, once we exhausted the subject of makeup brands and hair spray? The only book Leo had opened since he flunked out of school was the Yellow Pages. I liked my men smart. Like Lyle. We could talk about anything—books, politics, music, even offbeat topics like how Michael Mann shot part of Manhunter at the St. Louis airport, and the gory details of Elvis’s autopsy. Lyle could quote romantic poetry and Shakespeare by the yard, which wasn’t a surprise, since he was an English professor. If we discussed Hairspray, it would be the movie, not the product.

We didn’t just talk, either. Oh, no. I remembered our nights and long afternoons together. Lyle made Leo look like a prancing kid. But I pushed those scenes out of my mind. I couldn’t think about that. There was no point in going on about it. We were through. We’d broken up at the end of last summer, and it was April now. We were finished. It was over.

I hadn’t dated anyone since the breakup. What choices did I have at age thirty-seven? The good ones were either married or gay. Where would I meet men, anyway? At the Gazette, I could choose from a limited number of bitter divorced men who griped about their ex-wives and wanted me to watch their kids on custody weekends. The Gazette single men were a discouraging collection who lived with their mothers or in dingy bachelor apartments. One guy used his lampshade as an emergency sock drier. The man knew nothing about laundry. If you needed your socks dried in a hurry, you nuked them.

My other choices were Clayton lawyers who worked eighty-hour weeks, and corporate types whose idea of a casual evening was to loosen their tie. No thanks. I was through with men. Watching Leo was all the action I wanted.

Look at that guy whip those hips. The man had lost his pants and shoes, and was now moving those long, strong legs and taut buns. The women in the audience were either swooning, screaming, or stuffing money in his Titanic G-string.

They were a cross section of respectable women. That group there, the thirty-somethings in the matronly flowered dresses and pantsuits, could be seen at any PTA meeting. Those gray-haired women with the sweet faces and soft, spreading figures looked like they belonged to a women’s sodality. Except I don’t think they ever yelled “Take it off. Take it all off!” in the church basement.

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 into 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 hospital 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.

“I admit Charlie gutted Milt’s office with the sensitivity of a starving sewer rat,” I said. “Even took the guy’s Waterman pen. And I’ve never forgotten what Hattie Harrigan tried to do to me when I broke my elbow. What a sweetheart she was. Called all my sources while I was laid up and said she was taking over my column. Fortunately, an outraged source called me, and I called you.”

“And I nipped that ambitious little twerp’s takeover in the bud. Columnist!” Georgia snorted. “My ass.”

It was one reason why I helped cover up her illness now. She’d helped me when I’d needed it most. I was not going to lose her. Both my parents were dead. My grandparents, too. I’d already lost the one man I loved. But I wouldn’t lose the one woman I cared about. If I had to drag her out of the grave with my bare hands, I was not going to let her die.

So far, Georgia had successfully kept her bout with cancer hidden from the Gazette