St. Louis Noir

by Scott Phillips

  Inside, I take a seat at the bar and order a Wiedemann’s, which the bartender has never heard of. “They still make Old Style?” I ask.

  “I got Bud, Bud Lite, and that’s it on tap. In a bottle I got Corona.”

  “Is that A-B?”

  “They distribute it.” Her hair is cut in a sort of shag, with gradations of color ranging from platinum to black, and her tank top is so tight it looks like it must hurt.

  “I got an old grudge. Got fired from there over a fight with my supervisor back in ’82.”

  “Shouldn’t argue with the boss.”

  “Wasn’t that kind of fight. I cut off a piece of his left ear.”

  “Hah. Like Johnny Cash.”

  “All right, I guess I can forgive them after all this time. Bud it is.”

  She must be about thirty, and I suppose that’s considered old in this place. She pulls a draft, sets it in front of me, and gives me a curious, crooked-toothed smile. “What’s your name, sugar?”

  “Luther,” I say, in honor of an old, dead cellmate.

  “Well, Luther, I’m Noodles, if you need anything you let me know. Got Salty Taffee and Cinderella up on stages one and three and there’s lap dances in the back.”

  At 12:32 Doug walks in and shouts a big hearty hello to Noodles, who waves back at him with a smile as insincere as I’ve ever seen outside of a jailhouse preacher’s face. It’s funny hearing his voice. It hasn’t changed much, a little croakier than before but still full of the joyous conviction that the whole damned world loves him. He heads straight for a back room, snapping his fingers and shouting out for a certain Cherry Vanilla to join him.

  “Not a particular fan of old Dougie’s?” I ask Noodles, seeing her as a potential ally.

  “That cocksucker. You know him?”

  “Used to. Not an admirer myself. What’s your beef? He a bad tipper?”

  “Nothing like that. Let’s just say he has a cavalier attitude and leave it at that.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “And in a place like this, the competition is pretty fierce.”

  I wait for five minutes. I don’t know how long a lap dance is supposed to take, but if Doug’s a quick finisher it’s time to intervene. I leave a twenty on the bar and wink at Noodles.

  “Time to renew that acquaintance,” I tell her, jerking my thumb toward the door behind which Doug disappeared with Cherry Vanilla.

  “You can’t go back there, Luther,” she says.

  “It’s okay, I’m just poking my head in.”

  She starts to say something else, then stops. Surely her job is to stop me, or to call the muscle and have them do it, but she cocks her head and looks amused.

  * * *

  Cherry Vanilla is a remarkably fit young woman, her back muscles and quads as well developed as any obsessive penitentiary body builder’s, and as I quietly push the door open she’s gyrating her pelvis just above Doug’s own to the tune of “Dream On,” his cock in his hand and his eyes fixed on her finely trimmed blond bush, a harsh grimace of concentration on his mouth. Their skin shines purple in the lurid glow of a black light.

  “Hiya, Dougie, funny seeing you here,” I say, and, startled, he stands, sending Cherry Vanilla tumbling to the ground.

  “Jesus, Doug!” she yells, then turns to face me. “You get the shit out! You want a lap dance, you ask at the fucking bar.”

  Meanwhile Doug’s looking at me, completely baffled, mouth open like he’s about to venture a guess as to who I might be, cock still engorged in his hand. He looks as dumb as I’ve ever seen him look.

  I pull the filleting knife out of my inside jacket pocket and Cherry Vanilla screams. The music is loud enough that I can at least entertain the notion that the security guard didn’t hear. I lunge forward and get a good swipe at Doug’s dick. I get his hand instead, and when he jerks it away I slice his swollen dick. It’s not completely severed, but it dangles by a fleshy thread, and Doug and Cherry Vanilla are both yelling. They’re so loud I have to get right up on top of Doug, who’s writhing on the floor and sobbing.

  He looks up at me in horrified recognition, tries to say something but can’t manage to form the words.

  “Remember, no statute of limitations for murder, Mr. Lieutenant Governor,” I tell him.

  He’s looking in horror at the bloody shreds of his member, keening in pain and sorrow.

  “I asked you to do one thing,” I tell him. “One little goddamn thing.”

  * * *

  I run out to find the security man, a potbellied, mustachioed goofball in a stained Cinnamon Bunzz polo shirt, huffing toward the back. “For Christ’s sake, he stabbed her!” I call out to him. “Call an ambulance, call the cops!”

  Not being a very good security man, he runs right past me toward the screams. Before I walk out the emergency exit to my car, I wave at Noodles and give her a thumbs-up.

  This morning I bought what I understand is called a burner phone, since I don’t want this call traced to Paula. As I drive away, I dial the first of a pair of numbers I programmed into it this morning. “KSDK TV,” a voice says. “How can I direct your call?”

  “Newsroom,” I say.

  After I’m confident I’ve convinced the initially skeptical reporter, I call the Post-Dispatch and give them the same tip. By that time I’ve made it from 55 north onto 70 west, and I figure it will take me a good five hours to get to KC and Paula. I don’t intend to go so much as a mile per hour above the posted limit, don’t intend to ever commit so much as a misdemeanor ever again.

  By the time I hit Wentzville I’m feeling pretty good. I put on KSHE and I take it as a good omen that they’re playing Foghat.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Jedidiah Ayres is a preacher’s kid, high school graduate, and the author of some books. No awards, no convictions.

  Chris Barsanti is the author of Filmology, The Sci-Fi Movie Guide, and the Eyes Wide Open film guide series, and a contributor to Punk Rock Warlord: The Life and Works of Joe Strummer. His writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Playboy, the Millions, PopMatters, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Film Journal. He is partial to Schlafly Pale Ale.

  Laura Benedict is the author of five novels of dark suspense, including Charlotte’s Story and Bliss House, the first books of the Bliss House trilogy. Her work has also appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, PANK, and numerous anthologies like The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers. She lives with her family in Southern Illinois. For more information, visit laurabenedict.com.

  Michael Castro, called “a legend in St. Louis poetry” by Charles Guenther in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is a widely published poet and translator. How Things Stack Up is his fifteenth book. Castro is the recipient of the Guardian Angel of St. Louis Poetry Award from River Styx and the Warrior Poet Award from Word in Motion, both for lifetime achievement. In 2015, he was named St. Louis’s first poet laureate.

  S.L. Coney, whose formative years were spent bouncing around the United States, is proud to call St. Louis home. Coney’s short story “Dead By Dawn” appeared in Noir at the Bar, Volume 2.

  Umar Lee is a St. Louis–based writer, activist, cabbie, wrestling enthusiast, and father of two. He has previously published two novels, Tea Party Twelver and the Muslim Brothers and Dunya Dust. His work has also appeared in the Guardian, Politico, and Quartz, amongst other publications. He appeared frequently on MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and Press TV discussing the Ferguson protests after the murder of Michael Brown. Presently he’s a candidate for mayor of St. Louis.

  John Lutz is the author of more than forty-five novels and 225 short stories. His thriller Single White Female was made into the movie of the same title, starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh. He has received an Edgar Award and two Shamus Awards, as well as the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award. Lutz and his wife Barbara split their time between St. Louis, Missouri and Sarasota, Florida.

  Jason Makansi's short stories have appeared in the D
os Passos Review, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, Marginalia, Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America, Rainbow Curve, Arabesques, Noir at the Bar 2, and other publications. He is an associate editor for December literary magazine and cofounded Blank Slate Press (now Amphorae Publishing Group). He recently completed his first novel, The Moment Before.

  Paul D. Marks is the author of the Shamus Award–winning noir mystery-thriller White Heat. His story “Howling at the Moon” was short-listed for both the 2015 Anthony and Macavity awards for Best Short Story. Midwest Review calls Marks’s noir novella Vortex “a nonstop staccato action noir.” He also coedited the anthology Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea.

  Colleen J. McElroy is the winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award for her book Queen of the Ebony Isles. Her most recent collection of poems, Sleeping with the Moon, received a 2008 PEN/Oakland National Literary Award, and Here I Throw Down My Heart was a finalist for the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Book Award, the Walt Whitman Award, the Phyllis Wheatley Award, and the Washington State Governor’s Book Award. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

  Scott Phillips was born in Wichita, Kansas, and lived for many years in Paris (France) and Southern California. In the early 2000s he moved to St. Louis. He is the author of seven novels and a collection of short stories, and his novel The Ice Harvest was made into a film in 2005, directed by Harold Ramis and starring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Connie Nielsen.

  L.J. Smith is a writer and producer of theatrical and community affairs productions. She is the founder and executive director of A Call to Conscience, Inc., a theater collective that dramatizes historical themes dealing with the struggles of the oppressed. Smith has had poetry published in Sisters-Nineties Literary Magazine, and Drumvoices Revue. Her poem “City of the Century” was selected for inclusion in the 2009 Metro Arts in Transit’s Poetry in Motion program.

  LaVelle Wilkins-Chinn, a native of St. Louis, is the dramaturge for A Call to Conscience (c2c), a St. Louis­–based theater collective, and has performed with several theater companies including the St. Louis Black Repertory Company and Pamoja Theatre Workshop. Her fiction has been included in The Hoot and Holler of the Owls, a Hurston-Wright anthology, Arts Today, an online St. Louis e-zine, and her poetry has been featured in Drum Voices Revue, a multicultural arts periodical.

  Calvin Wilson is an arts and entertainment writer who has worked at the Kansas City Star and, currently, at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Wilson is also creator and host of Somethin’ Else, a jazz program on the Radio Arts Foundation radio station in St. Louis.

  BONUS MATERIAL

  Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

  Also available in the Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITERS ON THE RUN

  From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple

  In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.

  It may not have been appropriate, but it sure was noir.

  From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.

  My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exposure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.

  Both of my parents worked overtime. By the time my sister Kathy was nine and I was seven, we were latchkey kids prone to roam, explore, and occasionally break laws. Though an arrest for shoplifting helped curb my delinquent tendencies, the interest in crime remained. After college I worked with adolescents and completed a master’s degree in social work; my focus was on teen delinquency.

  Throughout the 1990s, my relationship with the urban underbelly expanded as I spent a great deal of time in dank nightclubs populated by degenerates and outcasts. I played bass guitar in Girls Against Boys, a rock and roll group that toured extensively in the US and Europe. The long hours on the road not spent on stage gave way to book publishing, which began as a hobby in 1996 with my friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan.

  The first book we published was The Fuck-Up, by Arthur Nersesian—a dark, provocative, well-crafted tale from the disenfranchised. A few years later Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin became one of our early commercial successes. The book was widely praised both for its classic noir voice and its homage to the people of South Brooklyn. While Brooklyn is chock-full of published authors these days, Tim is one of the few who was actually born and bred here. In his five decades, Tim has never left the borough for more than five weeks at a stretch and he knows the place, through and through, better than anyone I’ve met.

  In 2003, inspired by Brooklyn’s unique and glorious mix of cultures, Tim and I set out to explore New York City’s largest borough in book form, in a way that would ring true to local residents. Tim loves his home borough despite its flagrant flaws, and was easily seduced by the concept of working with Akashic to try and portray its full human breadth.

  He first proposed a series of books, each one set in a different neighborhood, whether it be Bay Ridge, Williamsburg, Park Slope, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, or Canarsie. It was an exciting idea, but it’s hard enough to publish a single book, let alone commit to a full series. After we considered various other possibilities, Tim came upon the idea of a fiction anthology organized by neighborhood, each one represented by a different author. We were looking for stylistic diversity, so we focused on “noir,” and defined it in the broadest sense: we wanted stories of tragic, soulful struggle against all odds, characters slipping, no redemption in sight.

  Conventional wisdom dictates that literary anthologies don’t sell well, but this idea was too good to resist—it seemed the perfect form for exploring the whole borough, and we got to work soliciting stories. We batted around book titles, including Under the Hood, before settling on Brooklyn Noir. The volume came together beautifully and was a surprise hit for Akashic, quickly selling through multiple printings and winning awards. (See pages 548–550 for a full list of prizes garnered by stories originally published in the Noir Series.)

  Having seen nearly every American city, large and small, through the windows of a van or tour bus, I have developed a deep fondness for their idiosyncrasies. So for me it was easy logic to take the model of Brooklyn Noir—sketching out dark urban corners through neighborhood-based short fiction—and extend it to other cities. Soon came Chi
cago Noir, San Francisco Noir, and London Noir (our first of many overseas locations). Selecting the right editor to curate each book has been the most important decision we make before assembling it. It’s a welcome challenge because writers are often enamored of their hometowns, and many are seduced by the urban landscape’s rough edges. The generous support of literary superheroes like George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom have edited series volumes, has been critical.

  There are now fifty-nine books in the Noir Series. Forty of them are from American locales. As of this writing, a total of 787 authors have contributed 917 stories to the series and helped Akashic to stay afloat during perilous economic times. By publishing six to eight new volumes in the Noir Series every year, we have provided a steady venue for short stories, which have in recent times struggled with diminishing popularity. Akashic’s commitment to the short story has been rewarded by the many authors—of both great stature and great obscurity—who have allowed us to publish their work in the series for a nominal fee.

  I am particularly indebted to all sixty-seven editors who have cumulatively upheld a high editorial standard across the series. The series would never have gotten this far without rigorous quality control. There also couldn’t be a Noir Series without my devoted and tireless (if occasionally irreverent) staff led by Johanna Ingalls, Ibrahim Ahmad, and Aaron Petrovich.

  * * *

  This volume serves up a top-shelf selection of stories from the series set in the United States. USA Noir only scratches the surface, however, and every single volume has more gems on offer.

  When I set out to compile USA Noir, I was delighted by the immediate positive responses from nearly every author I contacted. The only author on my initial invitation list who isn’t included here is one I couldn’t track down: the publisher explained to me that the writer was “literally on the run.” While I’m disappointed that we can’t include the story, the circumstance is true to the Noir Series spirit.