Rubout by Elaine Viets

Then people quickly donated a bunch of old books, and Ladue got a subscription to
Life
magazine. These intellectual treasures were kept at a fire station. Ladue said it had a library and voted to taxthemselves one cent to maintain it, and save nine whole pennies. Except the courts didn’t let Ladue get by with it. This cheap trick was labeled “a new low in political subterfuge” in the newspapers back then. Ten years later, Ladue donated its ghost library to the prisoners at the county jail.
    There was a lot more like this, including a nostalgic interview with an old Ladue resident who bragged he drank the best bourbon at a Ladue eatery all during Prohibition. He said a disgruntled employee tipped a prohibition officer that the place had 250 cases of booze stashed in an old cistern. The restaurant owner put three hundred dollars down on the bar and the agent forgot about the stash. This charming tale of bribery was repeated in an adoring newspaper article.
    I’d been hearing Ladue stories like these all my life. But Lyle wasn’t from St. Louis, so he didn’t absorb these attitudes with the beer-perfumed air. Now I had more than an attitude. I had facts about why I did not like Ladue. So what did this information tell me about Sydney or the Vander Venter family?
    Nothing. But I knew someone who could tell me: Endora. She was the
Gazettes
Ladue specialist. Endora had been at the
Gazette
so long she didn’t quite rate an office, but she had a three-walled windowless lair where the Family section petered out into the no-man’s land between Sports and Food. The economically correct pastel pods we sat in never came back this far. Neither did anyone who was on the fast track for promotion. In this cramped, airless space that nobody wanted, Endora had accumulated two battered gray desks piled with yellowing newspapersand old books, a three-legged bookcase (she used a brick to prop up the fourth side), an assortment of straggling plants, a phone, and an old, slow computer.
    Endora sat on a straight-back wooden chair that would have crippled an ordinary person. She was handsome in a horse-faced, WASPy, don’t-give-a-damn way. She let her hair turn gray and she pulled it straight back in a ponytail. Her strong body had softened and thickened and her face had more lines than one of her daddy’s railroad maps. But on her it looked good.
    Endora was the last survivor of a robber baron who made his money in nineteenth-century railroads. Like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers, he kept his fabulous fortune one step ahead of the law and became a pillar of society. He built a huge stone-and-marble mansion on Portland Place, with a two-story Tiffany window and fireplaces from a French chateau. About 1924, when gloomy Victorian palaces were unfashionable, his son—Endoras grandfather—moved to Ladue, so he could be closer to his favorite country clubs. Grandfather was good at investments. His son, Endoras daddy, inherited Grandfather’s gambling streak without the old man’s shrewdness and eventually lost most of the family fortune at the gaming tables. When he was down to his last half million, Daddy skipped with his secretary for Mexico. They did not take the train.
    Endora’s Mummy, who always did the right thing, quietly pined away, with a little help from the liquor cabinet. But Endora was healthy as a horse, and, alas, she rather resembled one. With no familymoney, a lumpy figure, and outrageous opinions, it was doubtful she would ever marry. There was almost nothing left after the family home was sold off and Daddy’s debts were paid. Something had to be done. Her grandfathers friends let her live in a charming guest cottage on the old Gravois estate. The cottage was big enough for a family of four. Then they got her a job at the
Gazette.
Endora, the product of the best private schools (she hung her Vassar degree in the guest John, in case we didn’t know) wasn’t a bad writer. The editors soon found her enormously