Kansas City Noir

by Steve Paul

  “I tracked down that complaint. I’ve heard the tape. Definitely an older man’s voice disguised as a woman’s. I found the pay phone and the security camera at the tennis club that covered the parking lot. I had the time and date of the phone call. You were on the tape, making that call.”

  James closed his eyes. He had forgotten that sometimes there were worse things than the Bloods.

  “What do you want, Mr. Clark?”

  “I’m coming for you. You won’t know when or how. But I’m coming.” He hung up.

  James set the phone down with trembling fingers. He couldn’t very well call the police. He thought about calling Scotty, but to say what? Goodbye? I’m a guilty man? I’ve been given the death penalty? It’s revenge, but it’s also justice?

  He walked outside, ignoring the heat warnings, and started to pull out the chickweed that had invaded his purple coneflowers the way the Clarks had invaded his life. You could try everything to get rid of it, but the only thing that worked permanently was spraying. If you did that, you were guilty of poisoning the earth and contributing to the death of birds and insects. He watched the butterflies and fat bumblebees flitting among the coneflowers and mints.

  In September, there were goldfinches. One tiny bright-yellow bird to each coneflower’s seed head. Celeste, at the end, had loved to watch them from the dining room window, each making its flower bob back and forth as it pecked for seeds.

  There would be no goldfinches for James this year. No September. Heat or no heat, black ops husband or no black ops husband, James would stay right here. In the garden. With Celeste.

  THELMA AND LAVERNE

  BY JOHN LUTZ

  West 8th Street

  There was smooth trumpet music wafting from big rectangular speakers hooked up to a CD player. Sounded like Miles Davis.

  “This is anybody’s idea of odd,” said Kansas City homicide detective Rodney Small. Small was six foot five and 250 pounds.

  His partner, Eddie Jarvis, was much smaller and had been a middle-weight Golden Gloves boxer. “Killer” Jarvis, though he’d never killed anything larger than a roach. He had cauliflower ears, and a ridge of major scar tissue over his left eye that made him look perpetually doubtful.

  “Count me in with the anybodys,” he said, gazing down at the dead woman who’d been butchered with a sharp knife that lay nearby. There was a red-stained white handkerchief next to the knife; most likely it had been used to wipe the weapon clean of prints. The victim had obviously been tortured all over her body with the knife before being disemboweled. Some monster’s sick idea of fun.

  But it wasn’t the body on the floor that got to Small and Jarvis; they’d seen plenty of brutalized murder victims in their years as cops. It was the man on the sofa who made them wonder.

  Small was looking at something else. “What’s that over there?” he asked, pointing. “That a note?”

  Earlier, in St. Louis

  Esther Clyde saw her child make a gesture precisely like that of her long-dead grandfather, and that creeped her out. Little things like this sometimes tipped the balance.

  And just like that, she decided she’d finally had enough.

  Her marriage to Seth, who worked for the state of Missouri in some low-paying job she didn’t understand, had long since crumbled. They were no longer living together. Hadn’t been for six months. Two-year-old Randy could go live with his father, who’d lost a long court fight for custody, claiming Esther wasn’t right in the head. (Like he was.) Well, Seth could have Randy now. Esther was going to hit the road with her friend Jenine Balk.

  Jenine had suggested as much several times. She hated her boss at Hunter’s Tales restaurant, where she was a hostess and the walls were festooned with what taxidermists had made of various dead animal parts. There was a rabbit with a tail like a fish, and a squirrel that had wings, to name a couple. Esther didn’t blame Jenine for wanting to get out. The damned place was difficult enough to eat in, much less work in.

  It was hard to switch jobs in St. Louis, because it was hard to find jobs in the first place. After a brief phone conversation, Esther had easily convinced Jenine it was time for them to leave together for other, possibly greener pastures.

  Kansas City beckoned. It was way on the opposite side of the state, if not the world. Esther had been there a few times, walked around Country Club Plaza, visited a few blues joints that weren’t just tourist attractions, learned what good barbecue was. Goin’ to Kansas City … That was what Esther called running away.

  When Esther phoned across town to her mother and told her what she was about to do, her mother said, “I hope you know what you’re about to do, Esther.”

  “Nobody knows what they’re about to do,” Esther said. “Not really.”

  “You said a mouthful there,” her mother shot back, and hung up.

  Esther drove her old Ford SUV over and dropped off Randy at Seth’s place. She took a few minutes to say goodbye to the kid.

  Seth said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Esther.”

  “I know exactly what I’m doing,” Esther told him. Different strokes, she thought.

  When she drove away, she didn’t look back. The past was gone, and only the present and future mattered.

  That was the plan.

  * * *

  Right off, she traded in the Ford for an older but snazzier red Plymouth Sebring convertible. The guy she gave the Ford to was going to sell it for parts, and for a little extra cash Esther talked him into going ahead and letting the state think the car had been junked out. It had old Alabama plates anyway. Seth would say she didn’t legally own the car if she didn’t transfer the title, and she’d paid way too much. She didn’t care. Let him try to find her through her car. She had her mysterious ways and reasons.

  She drove the car to her apartment with the top down even though the sky looked ready to bust open and rain.

  It didn’t take her long to pack. She jammed her single Samsonite suitcase into the car’s trunk, then swung by and picked up Jenine at her place.

  Jenine was waiting out front with her single large suitcase. Esther was pleased. The two friends had pledged to travel light and were sticking to it.

  “Nice wheels,” Jenine said. She was a little on the tall side, while Esther was short. Jenine was blond. Esther was a brunette. Though slender, Jenine was shapely. Esther was slim from top to toe. Jenine wore a constant smile and looked pleasantly distracted. Esther seemed always to be concentrating on some elusive mathematical equation. An insensitive person who used the one-through-ten scale for women would put them both down at about seven. Jenine figured they were a collective six. Esther thought closer to nine, if Jenine would drop a few pounds.

  Jenine hoisted her suitcase onto the backseat and climbed into the convertible without opening the door. “You notice it’s starting to rain?” she said.

  Esther nodded. Said, “Don’t the two of us just remind you of that movie, Thelma and Laverne?”

  “That title don’t sound quite right, but yes, we do,” Jenine said.

  “Okay,” Esther responded. “I’m Thelma and you’re Laverne. Our new selves.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Jenine—Laverne—said. “Only I ain’t sure about the name.”

  “Get sure.”

  “Yes, Ma’am!” Laverne grinned and saluted. “Where we goin’, Thelma?”

  “Kansas City, here we come.”

  “Amen!” Laverne said, though not with religious conviction.

  The rain picked up. Within a few seconds it ran in rivulets down Thelma’s forehead from her short, naturally curly hair.

  “Gentlewoman, start your engine,” Laverne said.

  Thelma did, but before driving away she raised the top on the convertible so they didn’t look completely crazy.

  She drove out to highway 270, then went north and got on I-70 headed west, toward Kansas City. When they took the bridge across the Missouri River, Thelma thought it was like crossing that Rubicon river she’d h
eard about, where there was no turning back. Not ever.

  The two friends would start new lives under their new names in their new city, and they would date men who were more sophisticated than Seth or the losers Laverne dated. Laverne could get a job being hostess at a higher-class restaurant for much more generous pay. And if she didn’t like it there, she would quit. When either of them had had enough and, for whatever reason, wanted to move on to a more golden West, that is what they would do. What they were was completely free, even from each other.

  The rain stopped and the sun came out, just for them. Or so it seemed. The Sebring rattled some but ran smoothly over the pavement, reminding Thelma of a magic carpet. Or the magic of movies, and she and Laverne were the stars. They would live in what they’d make a luxury apartment. They would dine out when they felt like it and shop at the Plaza and live like royalty. To the west lay the queendom of happiness.

  All part of the plan.

  Only a few miles outside Kansas City, they had a head-on collision with a pickup truck.

  * * *

  The two vehicles barely clipped each other, like a high-speed metallic kiss. The Sebring swayed and swerved but stayed on the highway. The pickup truck went bouncing and jouncing off the shoulder and into some high weeds.

  “Fool was goin’ the wrong way!” Laverne said, as Thelma pulled over and parked. “Musta come down the off-ramp. Did you see him? Did you see that bastard comin’ right at us?” She sounded somewhat shaken, but not unduly so.

  Thelma ignored her, got out, and walked to the front of the Sebring, which was idling on the highway’s slanted shoulder as if the driver had pulled over there to study a map or make a cell phone call. The left front fender was bashed in and there was a long scrape down the car’s side. It was still running, though. The engine was ticking over smoothly.

  Laverne grinned at her through the windshield and Thelma grinned back.

  When Thelma was behind the steering wheel again, she said, “Let’s drive back and look in on that fool in the pickup truck.”

  “Screw him!” Laverne said.

  “That’s just what I wanna tell him.”

  They went in reverse back to where the truck sat almost out of sight in the brush. It was black, dented all over, and silent.

  Thelma and Laverne walked to where the driver was seated behind the truck’s steering wheel.

  The driver wasn’t a he; it was a hefty woman wearing a red and white do-rag on her head. Some of the red was blood.

  “Damn fool didn’t have her seat belt buckled,” Laverne said. “Look there where her head banged on the windshield.”

  The truck’s windshield was starred as if it had been struck from inside with a hammer. There was blood on the break in the glass.

  “Other one was belted in, but he don’t look so good either,” Thelma said.

  They moved around to the passenger side of the truck and both gasped at what they saw. The passenger was a mannequin wearing men’s clothing, including blue jeans, a plaid shirt, and a tan slouch hat pulled low over its face.

  “Don’cha get it?” Thelma said. “She was traveling with a dummy so people’d think a man was along and wouldn’t mess with her.”

  “And so she could use the car pool lanes,” Laverne said.

  “That too.”

  It was true that more and more women were traveling with artificial male passengers. Dummies or mannequins with obviously male clothing. Real enough at a glance. A safety measure in a dangerous world. Not much help in this situation.

  “What now?” Laverne asked.

  “I want that dummy,” Thelma said.

  Laverne glanced back into the truck. “What for?”

  “I want it. Simple as that.”

  “It’s got blood on it. From the driver’s head, I guess.”

  “Don’t care,” Thelma said. “You watch an’ tell me when there’s no cars comin’, and I’ll get Henry outta there and put him in the Sebring.”

  “Henry?”

  “I always thought if I got mixed up with a man named Henry, it’d bring me luck.”

  “Henry it is, then.” Laverne moved to slightly higher ground where she could watch the highway. “Lotsa bugs around here,” she said, slapping at her bare arm.

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen, Esther—”

  “Thelma.”

  “Okay. That lady in the car is surely dead. Ain’t this some kinda crime?”

  “Stealin’ a dummy? I guess so. Just a misdemeanor, I’d imagine.”

  “I meant leavin’ a dead body in a vehicle like we are.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Still an’ all, just up and leavin’ like we’re doin’ … Ain’t that a crime?”

  “Don’t know an’ don’t care,” Thelma said.

  She leaned into the truck and wrestled the mannequin from the passenger seat, careful not to get much blood on her. The driver’s eyes were open, as if she was staring at the speedometer.

  “Clear,” Laverne said.

  * * *

  Kansas City worked out surprisingly well. Laverne right off got a job waiting tables in a jazz club on West 8th Street. It was in a neighborhood that used to be the old Garment District, and where the aroma of coffee from a nearby roasting plant on Broadway hung in the air. Laverne found she liked the pervasive coffee scent, even if it did soon emanate from most of her clothes. They served more liquor than food at the club, and the tips were good.

  Thelma, though she was the one without the boobs, found work as a pole dancer in a place called T&A. The pervasive scents there were booze and stale perspiration. Laverne told Thelma she didn’t know she could dance. Thelma said that didn’t matter because nobody could dance anyway in the stiff leather outfit the management made her wear. Laverne decided not to ask any more questions.

  The two of them pooled their money and rented an apartment in a neighborhood where the odds were okay that they wouldn’t get raped or robbed. They had to park the Sebring out at the curb, though, and sometimes kids or somebody wrote stuff on the windows with soap. It was no big deal, because it came right off with a razor blade and a damp rag.

  So they were happy enough there, Thelma, Laverne, and Henry.

  Sometimes Laverne wondered about Thelma and Henry. Laverne didn’t treat the mannequin like a real person, but she did buy him a change of clothes. Even a pretty good gray suit—wide in the shoulders so it looked something like a zoot suit—at a Goodwill store. Taught herself to tie a man’s tie.

  It did give Laverne the green willies when Thelma would talk to Henry like he was real, propped up there in a corner of the sofa, where he usually sat. Laverne even walked in on them once when Thelma was telling Henry a long story about some guy at T&A who’d tried to stuff a five-dollar bill down her leather costume and got his watch band snagged in some chains. When Thelma gave the watch back to the guy he’d kissed it, despite where it had been. Thelma had told the story to Laverne more than once or twice.

  Laverne drove Thelma to work one day and went into T&A just to see the place. It was rough and full of rough people. Only a few of the customers were women. Most of the men looked as if they’d just gotten out of prison. They were staring at the busty redhead dancing around a pole like she was a juicy steak they were about to cut into. Laverne wondered how frail little Thelma could stand it there.

  Maybe a reasonably stable home life helped. Stable compared to life at T&A, anyway.

  The three of them didn’t watch much television other than reality shows, but they usually had a radio playing jazz. They’d gotten fond of that kind of music, and Kansas City was one of the birthplaces of jazz. Laverne wondered how that was possible—one of the birthplaces. Thelma always got a big laugh out of it when Laverne pondered that question aloud, and would glance at Henry as if he was sitting there laughing along with her, instead of just sitting there being a mannequin. Laverne thought that in truth his expression was always kind of haughty. She suggested one time that Henry was a b
it big for his pinstripe britches, and Thelma got so mad she threw an apple at her that almost struck her in the face.

  Thelma saw a classified ad in the Star and bought some fella’s jazz CD collection and player, with big remote speakers. Soon she began leaving music on for Henry to listen to when he was alone.

  Things got stranger from there. Laverne would find odd things lying about the apartment, like a black thong that, so far as Laverne knew, Thelma never wore. Least ways, she hadn’t seen it in the wash. And when Laverne looked in Thelma’s dresser to see if one of her shirts was in there by mistake, she discovered some kind of weird metal clamps poorly hidden under a stack of folded T-shirts. And one day Laverne noticed a used condom on the tile floor near the back of the toilet.

  Laverne hoped Thelma wasn’t mixed up with one of those sicko types she’d seen at T&A. Those guys could bruise a woman just with their eyes.

  Then she chastised herself. Maybe the guys at T&A were simply normal red-blooded American men. What was that saying about books and covers?

  Laverne decided to make a joke out of the condom. “Saw somethin’ this mornin’ that made me wonder,” she told Thelma over a breakfast of coffee and cheese pastries at a nearby Starbuck’s. “You and Henry gettin’ it on?”

  Thelma didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Not exactly.”

  “What’s that mean?” Laverne had never really examined the mannequin for anatomical accuracy. Just thinking about it made something slither up her spine.

  “I think you better drop that question,” Thelma said. “About me and Henry.” She stood up, holding both cups. “I’ll go get us some warm-ups.”

  When Thelma returned to the table, they talked about how old Johnny Depp was and who was the best celebrity dancer.

  * * *

  Life fell into a routine that was at least bearable. Laverne got a raise. Thelma seemed happy enough pole dancing. The two women puttered around the apartment when they were home. The CD player was usually on, Miles Davis and his trumpet. Or Thelma filled the silence humming Miles Davis tunes. Henry pretty much just sat there.