Twin Cities Noir

by Julie Schaper

  “I talk and I’m guilty of extortion. Jail doesn’t appeal to me any more than it does to you. The truth is, though, you have no choice but to trust me.”

  “When?”

  “Let’s make the exchange this evening just after sunset. Say, nine o’clock.”

  I wasn’t sure he’d be able to get the money so quickly, but he didn’t object.

  “How will we know each other?” he asked.

  We’ll have no trouble, I thought. We’ll be the only cockroaches on the bridge.

  The High Bridge is built at a downward angle connecting the bluffs of Cherokee Heights with the river flats below Summit Avenue. Although it was after dark, the sodium vapor lamps on the bridge made everything garishly bright. I waited on the high end. Coming from the other side of the river, the rich man would have to walk uphill to meet me. I found that appealing.

  The lights of downtown St. Paul spread out below me. At the edge of all that glitter lay the Mississippi, curling like a long black snake into the night. The air coming over the bridge smelled of the river below, of silt and slow water and something else, it seemed to me. Dreamssounds hokey, but that’s what I was thinking. The river smelled of dreams. Dreams of getting back on track. Of putting my life together. Of new clothes, a good job, and, yeah, of putting the booze behind me. I didn’t know exactly how money was going to accomplish that last part, but it didn’t seem impossible.

  The evening was warm and humid. Cars came across the bridge at irregular intervals. There wasn’t any foot traffic. I thought for a while that he’d decided I was bluffing and had blown me off. Which was a relief in a way. That meant I had to do the right thing, take the evidence to the cops, let them deal with it. Kid might yet get his justice.

  Then I saw someone step onto the bridge at the far end and start toward me. I was a good quarter-mile away and at first I couldn’t tell if it was him. When the figure was nearly halfway across, I realized it wasn’t the rich man. It was the personal assistant. She stopped in the middle of the bridge and waited, looking up at the Heights, then down toward the flats, uncertain which way I would come.

  What the hell was this all about? There was only one way to find out. I walked out to meet her.

  I wasn’t wearing the gray suit, but she recognized me anyway.

  “You were at the house this morning,” she said in that accent I decided was, indeed, French Canadian. Her hair hung to her ass and rippled like a velvet curtain. She wore an airy summer dress. The high hem lifted on the breeze, showing off her legs all the way to mid-thigh. Killer legs. Against this, Kid hadn’t stood a chance.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Who cares, as long as I have your money.” Her lips were thick and red around teeth white as sugar. I smelled her delicate perfume, the same scent that had washed over me that morning. It seemed to overpower the scent of the river.

  “Show me,” I said.

  “Where are my panties?”

  I reached into my pocket and dangled them in front of her. “Where’s my money?”

  From the purse she carried over her shoulder, she pulled a thick manila envelope. “The panties,” she said.

  “The envelope first.”

  She thought about it a moment, then handed it over. I looked inside. Four bundles of hundreds bound with rubber bands.

  “Want to count it?” she said.

  All I wanted was for the transaction to be over with and to be rid of this business. “I’ll trust you,” I said.

  She took the panties and threw them over the bridge railing. I watched them drop, catch the breeze, and cut toward the middle of the river, swift as a little black bat.

  “Gone forever.” She smiled.

  “You didn’t even check to make sure they were the ones. For all you know, I could have bought a pair just like them at Marshall Field’s.”

  “They would never let a bum like you into Marshall Field’s.” She turned with a swish of her long, scented hair and walked away, her dress lifting on the breeze.

  I watched until she’d grown small in the glare, then turned and headed back toward the Heights.

  I was ten feet from a new life when he spoke to me out of the shadow of the squat pines at the end of the bridge.

  “I’ll take the money.”

  He’d probably come across in one of the cars during my meeting with the woman. I couldn’t see his face, but he thrust a gun at me from the shadows and it glowed in the streetlights as if the metal were hot.

  “I give it to you, I’m dead,” I said.

  His voice spat from the dark. “You were dead from the beginning.”

  I sailed the envelope at him like a frisbee. It caught him in the chest. The gun muzzle flashed. I felt a punch in my belly. I spun and stumbled into the street in front of an MTC bus, which swerved, its horn blaring. I fled toward the dark, away from the streetlights.

  The bus passed, and he came after me on foot, a black figure against the explosion of light from the bridge. I ran, making my way along the streets that topped the Heights. I cut into an alley, across another street, then into another alley.

  Suddenly, inexplicably, my legs gave out. They just went limp. I sprawled in the gravel behind an old garage. A streetlamp not far away shed enough light that I could easily be seen. I managed to crawl into the shadow between two garbage cans, where I lay listening. I heard the slap of shoes hard and fast pass the alley entrance and keep going. Then everything got quiet.

  My shirt was soaked with blood. My legs were useless. I’d hoped to make it to the river, but that wasn’t going to happen. The end was going to come in a bed of weeds in a nameless alley. Nothing I could do about that.

  But about the man and the woman who’d killed Kid, there was still something I could do.

  I pulled the pair of panties from my pocket, the pair she’d given Kid and whose twin I’d found that afternoon at Marshall Field’s and bought with money made by selling my own blood. I drew out my pen and notepad and wrote a brief explanation, hoping whoever found me would notify the police.

  I was near the river, though I would never sit on its banks again. I closed my eyes. For a while, all I smelled was the garbage in the bins. Then I smelled the river. When I opened my eyes, there was Kid, grinning on the other side. Like he understood. Like he forgave me. I started toward him. The water, cold and black, crept up my legs. The current tugged at my body. In a few moments, it carried me away.

  BLIND SIDED

  BY ELLEN HART

  Uptown (Minneapolis)

  I was born in the time of monsters. My earliest memories were of my mother crying because she was frightened for my father, who was off fighting Japan in the Pacific. The names Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin swirled around my young mind like menacing black crows.

  I’ve always had a rather mixed relationship with the concepts of good and evil. I know the atom bomb was a horrible genie to release on the world, and yet if the U.S. hadn’t dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my father would surely have been killed. He flew a small plane that was slated to be part of the advance group sent to Japan to soften up their defenses just prior to our invasion. The invasion never happened. Instead, my father came home when I was six years old.

  In our house, the bomb was considered miraculous. As a young child, I never thought of it with anything other than a kind of exhilarated wonder. I’d longed to have my dad come home to us, and the bomb made that possible. But after he’d been back awhile, I realized, much to my astonishment, that he was a stranger. I wasn’t even sure I liked him. A year later he was dead. The bomb saved him so he could be knifed in a bar fight and bleed out on a barroom floor. That’s when I was first introduced to the concept of serendipity—another thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I’m not depressed—or crazy. At least, I tell myself I’m not, but I guess I’ll let you be the judge.

  As I grew up, the atom bomb was like a piece of coal flickering blue in my mind, never letting me forget what it had given and what
it had taken away. I came to the conclusion in college that people’s views of right and wrong tended to be both situational and generational. But that never really satisfied me, because although I wasn’t religious, I wanted to believe in absolutes. Right and wrong. Good and evil. Maybe that’s a flaw, but it’s who I am.

  My name is Leo Anderson, a suitably Minnesota sort of name for a boringly Minnesota sort of guy. I’m sixty-six, part Irish, but mostly Norwegian, a retired school teacher, the divorced father of two. And I’m going blind. Every morning, I wake up and look around my tiny bedroom to see what’s been erased since the night before. It’s a terrifying thing, this going blind business, and I hate it. I also hate being alone, living in this damn drafty apartment after being married for nearly thirty-eight years. Fact is, when I came home and told my wife about my diagnosis, it seemed to open up a sinister trap door in my marriage, releasing an angry accumulation of rabid emotions I never knew existed. Apparently, I wasn’t a very good husband. That part didn’t really come as a shock. I won’t lie to you. It’s another one of my flaws.

  When I first met my wife, I was instantly attracted. She was tall and slender, with long brown hair and intense gray eyes—eyes that seemed to hold a secret only I could decipher. I was twenty-seven and a determined romantic. Karen was handing out leaflets at a peace rally outside Northrup Auditorium. We started talking. I don’t know what got into me. I mean, I was usually pretty shy around women, but I asked her to have coffee with me when she was done. It all seemed so easy, so effortless, kind of like sledding down a snowy hill. By the time I got to the bottom and was able to stand on level ground, look squarely at what I’d done, it was two years later and we were married.

  If Karen hadn’t been pregnant with our first child, I probably would have left her. But when my son came along, everything changed. Not with the marriage, but with me. I finally had a purpose in my life. I believe I truly fell in love for the first time. My daughter followed a couple of years later. The marriage was never good, but my kids made it bearable. I feel bad now for the way I handled things. Maybe I should have ended the marriage, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that to my children, and so ultimately I guess I made a mess of everything. For many years, my life revolved around teaching and family. But that’s all behind me now. After such a noisy life, I had no idea this much silence existed in the world—so much space between a question and an answer. My days of working with kids had become ancient history. Or so I thought.

  The morning it all started, the clock on the nightstand beeped at the usual 6 a.m. I reached over and flipped off the alarm. It was late October, and the light didn’t hit my windows until closer to 7. The way the sun came in and moved around my apartment had become very important to me. I hated waking up in the dark. I figured I had the rest of my life for that.

  After breakfast, I took my usual shower. Next to the mirror in the bathroom I’d taped up a page I’d torn from a dictionary. When I moved to this apartment on Columbus a few months ago, I’d been able to read the words while I brushed my teeth. Official. Officiate. Officious. Offish. But that morning, I had to squint at the page, bend very close, and even then I could just barely make out the words.

  For the past few weeks, I’d spent part of each day moving around my apartment with my eyes closed. I was practicing, as I’d been taught. You can’t go blind in Minnesota without being offered a lot of help—it’s the way Minnesotans are.

  I’d been assigned a counselor to assist me with what they call “travel skill training,” another counselor for “daily living skills,” and I’d been given a list of therapists who could help me with the emotional aspects of going blind. We pay a lot of taxes, so we should get something other than the damn politicians for our money. Don’t get me started on state politics.

  I spent that morning in the kitchen, rearranging the cupboards for the third time. Everything had to be logical, and it took awhile to figure out what that was. I had a lot of memorizing to do before the lights went out for the last time. Nobody could predict when it would happen, but it wasn’t far off. By early afternoon, I was sitting on the couch next to a bright reading light with a family album in my lap, my glasses resting on my nose and a magnifying glass in my hand. There was so much I wanted to burn into my memory—mainly, the faces of my children, the good times we had together.

  Speaking of my kids, they don’t like me much right now. Or more accurately, they both seem to be afraid of me—for different reasons.

  My daughter is engaged to a man who has the body of an anorexic stork and a stretched, rubbery face that reminds me of the rooster in the cartoon movie, Chicken Run.Not a good combination. I figured one of the perks of blindness would be that I wouldn’t have to spend the next twenty years looking at him across a dinner table. And on the off chance that they presented me with grandchildren at some point in the future, I would never know if the children favored the rubber-faced stork or my beautiful daughter.

  Cary, that’s my daughter’s name, is afraid of me and her mother at the moment because she doesn’t want to be reminded that love sometimes fails. I guess I understand. My son comes by occasionally, but I can always tell that he’s watching me when he thinks I’m not looking. He’s afraid of some inner biology that will cause him to end up like his old man—blind and alone. Instead of their father, I’ve morphed into a gloomy omen. I hope they get over it—for their sake as much as mine.

  Anyway, by 3 that afternoon, I’d mustered up the courage to go for a walk. I slipped on my coat, grabbed my dark glasses, and headed outside with my cane in hand. It was only the second time I’d gone walking with my eyes closed. I’d already committed to memory the number of steps it took to walk along the hall to the front door and then down the outside stairs to the sidewalk. I tried not to cheat and open up my eyes as I walked along. I didn’t intend to go very far, because if I didn’t get home by dusk, I really couldn’t see my hand in front of my face—unless I had my mega flashlight with me, which I didn’t.

  It hadn’t snowed yet, so the sidewalks were clear. I figured I’d walk a couple of blocks, maybe as far as the convenience store across the park, and then call it a day. As I came to what I thought must be about midpoint in the block, I heard footsteps behind me. Before I knew what was happening, I was shoved to the ground. “What the—”

  “Shut up!” snarled a young voice.

  I twisted around, tried to make out the face, but it was just a blur.

  “Your wallet. Now.” He slammed a boot into my ribs just to make sure I knew he was serious. “The wallet!”

  I yanked it out of my back pocket. All I could think of was that I didn’t want him to hurt me. He could have whatever he wanted. Before I could give it to him, he grabbed it out of my hand.

  “Hey,” came a different voice, one that seemed to appear out of nowhere. This voice was equally young, but stronger. More confident. “The dude’s blind. Give it back.”

  “Shit, man! Get the fuck away from me.”

  I looked behind me and saw the second kid. The late-afternoon sun glinted off something metal in his hand.

  “That thing real?” asked my attacker, backing up a few steps.

  “Give him the wallet back or you’ll find out.” The second kid’s voice was taunting. Arrogant. But he was on my side so I cheered him on.

  “Fuck.” I felt the wallet hit my chest as the attacker sprinted off.

  I was still dazed, but I sat up, touching the scrape on the palm of my hand. It had been chewed raw from hitting the concrete.

  “Come on, man, I’ll help you. Get you home.”

  My rescuer put a strong hand under my arm as I staggered to my feet. I was a good foot taller than he was, but to my frightened eyes, he looked immensely young and robust.

  “Lean on me,” said the kid, seeing that I was unsteady. “Where do you live?”

  “The Standhope. At the end of the block.”

  He picked up my cane and pressed it into my hand, and then together we walked slo
wly back down the sidewalk to my apartment. We didn’t talk until we reached the locked security door.

  “Key?”

  I fished for it in my pocket.

  Entering the hallway, he asked my apartment number. I was grateful for the strong arm and never even considered that he might be as big a threat to me as the kid who’d knocked me down. Naïve is another one of my more admirable qualities.

  After getting me settled in my Laz-E-Boy, he took off his coat. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Through the kitchen. It’s next to the bedroom.”

  I wished he’d turned on a light. The apartment was growing dark. Something inside me warned not to let on that I still had some part of my vision left. He seemed to have a certain sympathy for blind people. If he knew I could see, it occurred to me, his sympathy might evaporate. I kept my dark glasses on so he couldn’t see my eyes. I wanted to be able to study him without him knowing it. He returned a minute later with a washcloth, some antiseptic cream, and a bandage.

  “Here,” he said, switching on the overhead light. He washed off my palm with the soapy cloth. After applying the cream, he placed a bandage over the biggest scrape. “You don’t want that to get infected.”

  “Thanks,” I said, still a little dazed, and also a bit surprised at his gentleness and concern.

  “You diabetic? That why you’re blind?”

  “No. An eye disease.”

  With the top light on, I could see a little better now. I watched him move around the living room. I guessed he was about fifteen. He had a stocky build and lank blond hair, and a dark patch on his forearm that I assumed was a tattoo. On his feet was a pair of bright red gym shoes. In the rear pocket of his jeans was an ominous bulge. That’s when I remembered the weapon I thought I had seen in his hand. Without thinking, I said, “Are you carrying a knife—or a gun?”

  “Toy gun. But it looks real.”

  In my forty-two years as a teacher, I’d developed a sixth sense about teenagers. I didn’t believe him. “You could get hurt carrying that thing, even if it is a toy.”