Kansas City Noir (8 page)
She was eighteen, said she was twenty, and had every appetite, none of which he could satisfy.
Sharon loved Thunderbirds, and she loved them in any color so long as it was blue. She’d slip her panties free under her skirt and toss them out the window of a speeding Thunderbird and discreetly bang a guy in the parking lot at Winstead’s just for giving her a ride and a chance to feel quickly alive before the duller world found her again and smothered her joy. Cruise down Main and circle the Plaza, in a set of wheels that roared through her dreams, the city lights so bright and whispering excitedly that all she craved existed, it was all here, right behind the golden doors of Jasper’s or the Savoy Grill, places where the people who mattered chewed with their mouths closed and their cufflinks gleaming. She’d cruise happily with the stranger of the day, excited by the fintails, the soft white seats plush against her bare ass, and she’d smile, smile and sigh. She craved Thunderbirds like her mother craved Jesus, but she craved them harder and knew where to find them.
She called all her boyfriends Bub, to keep them straight.
One sunny morning in that crackerbox house she spread her arms in the living room and when she found she could span her reach to both walls at once, she went into the bedroom for the pistol in the bottom bureau drawer. He slept on the couch, a miserable figure, far too plain in every detail, honking that honk, the leavings huffing in and out, and she put the pistol into the tiny mitts of the two-year-old whose arrival had doomed her, leaned the barrel to the sleeping head, let the goddamn kid take the rap. Hubby died before he could blink. The toddler bawled and hid under the coffee table. Sharon said, “Bless your heart, hon, don’t cry—it was an accident.”
One cop smelled her untamed scent and felt creeped-out by her strange affability; he told the chief that no toddler that small would be strong enough to jerk the trigger on a revolver, but he was ignored. It went down as a tragedy of an innocent nature and Sharon danced alone all night in the backyard singing to the only audience that mattered.
* * *
I fell in love with her through the pages of the
Kansas City Star
. A fifteen-year-old on 72nd Street in desperate need of mutual lubrication and associations that would bring a sinister edge to consciousness—she found me with her lupine eyes, beckoning from the front page, above the fold.
Why not grow some guts, you sissy, and come run with me as long as you last?
She was so much who she was, always, in any circumstance, that her looks didn’t matter, though she had those too. The bouffant of that year, the prim dresses and little Easter hats on a smokey-eyed killer, admitted her into my fantasies where she took root and ruled; and after the first mistrial I rode the bus downtown and wandered expectantly, as though she might be cruising 12th Street in that perfectly blue Thunderbird the insurance bought, looking for a male to seduce and fuck silly and snuff to feel that tingle once more. I went downtown often to volunteer my dick for her needs, my throat to her knife. I stood outside the corner drugstore where the burlesque girls rushed from the back doors of the Pink Pussy Cat and the Folies de Paris to buy makeup and barbiturates and greasepaint. I stood among the erotic artists smelling of sex and the damp wicked world and waited to be found by Sharon. Whatever beautiful evil she did would be oh, so worth it, if she did it to me—gun, knife, strangling cord from a lamp. I puffed with hope for an electric-black finish and kissed the
Star
every time she went on trial again.
The early trials were not about the dead husband, that came later. There were many obstacles in Sharon’s life, individuals who stymied her dreams, and she tended to murder them, promptly. (If she saw something she wanted she was instinctive as a wolf—if she could catch it, she ate it, and you don’t call wolves evil for their hunger; you see their powerful, pretty, and pitiless eyes, the mortal elegance of their moves, admire their elemental cunning, even, and when the wolf was Sharon you wanted sex too, in the weeds, under the stars—tear those pantyhose wide, spread that skirt, get lost feeding among the wild hunting thighs and ruffed fur.) Her crimes were so little planned yet boldly executed that she was very difficult to convict, as pure brio carried the day, most days, but the law is a relentless pest to the wild among us and keeps on coming with those cuffs and chains.
She liked blended scotch, plenty of rocks, things that glittered with apparent value, fake or real, and more, more of everything that appealed, everything that brought water to her mouth, everything that might satisfy her bottomless want for even a day, an hour, the length of time it took new silken unmentionables to fall from her body.
Thunderbirds again. His name was Roger, a married man with kids; he sold Thunderbirds, spent his days surrounded by a glory of them, in all colors and a few vintages, and she liked him for his Thunderbirds, and he liked the sudden, scorching sex. He grew fond of her hot habit of bouncing with all her sizzle squeezing on his dick till it felt like it might melt soft and be smeared away with the very next bounce. But he miscalculated his fuck-buddy horribly, kept his naked time with her brief, too brief, their meetings were limited, too limited, the wife, blame the wife, the kids and that goddamn wife, always some sort of shadow looming between Sharon and that big shiny feeling she chased everywhere.
I wanted to mail her a key to our front door, with directions to our house and a promise to die in the basement rumpus room however she wanted, make it special, astonish me, garnish your altar with my remains, but couldn’t find an address of any sort. Love asks so much of us when we are young and everything when we are old.
Roger’s wife answered her knocks and Sharon must have felt a sinking sensation; the wife was gorgeous. No wonder he was so slippery.
The gorgeous wife said, “Yes?”
“I have the saddest news, Mrs. G—my sister is cheating with a married man, and he’s your husband.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“They’re parked in a field a couple of miles from here. I feel so awful, that it’s my sister doing this, and they do it all the time, I’m ashamed to say, but she just won’t listen to me. I’ll take you to them so you can see for yourself and stop things from getting worse—you have a family to defend.”
The prosecutor waited several months to file charges because they couldn’t find the murder weapon; they finally went to trial without it. Many pictures of her in the
Star
, looking unconcerned and stylish, making me state aloud my sacred vows to that dangerous tilted chin and flameless eyes, until the headline appeared:
MISTRIAL!
She became a criminal celebrity with qualities they admired on 12th Street. The broken-nosed guys and whorish gals took her under their wings. She posted bond for the retrial, then posted bond again when charged with hubby’s murder. She could be found stalking under the neon lights that gave 12th Street and her life the dramatic tinge she sought and adored— smoking, laughing, swinging on the arms of starstruck gangsters and smitten cops, eating the finest beef in Kansas City while sitting at Harry Truman’s favorite table, hitting mom-and-pop pasta joints in Northeast or rib joints on Brooklyn and Armour, Sanderson’s Lunch at three a.m. for a greaseburger to soak up the scotch, waking wherever she fell, pulling on yesterday’s salty dress before wobbling to the sidewalk and crooking her finger at the next Bub she saw.
I, too, wandered beneath those lights of many colors, in continental slacks, Beatle boots, and a paisley shirt, stood on the corner waiting and knew this: it would do no good to be polite to her on 12th Street, gentlemanly. She would snicker at polite. Polite or gentlemanly behavior would make her snicker, and then she’d yank your wallet from your pocket and take all the folding money, throw down a couple of your own dollars before you, and say, “Have a bottle of pop on me, candy ass, then beat it.” You wouldn’t want her to snicker and rob you in public like that, it makes you feel so very small, and too alert to your own smallness, so you’d best come on to her a little bit rough, or a lot rough, show her some edges, smile wide and rich and snarly. Then, she’d be more fun than you’ve ever had. If Sharon just once took you into her embrace for a night, or most of a night, you’d leave rearranged and poor but made fresh again by the natural world and what it can do when it likes you and feels like fucking.
Who wouldn’t love her?
She made the courts and law and juries look like suckers at her command. Mistrial, mistrial, and a new trial announced, then the murder weapon was discovered behind her mother’s stove by new residents; and she said to her current Bub, a bartender at the Pussycat named Tony, of course: “I am magic, but I can’t be magic every day—better roll toward Mexico. Coming?”
In Mexico City: Did Raul Sedillo Ortiz have a gold tooth that beckoned? A watch with diamond inlays that glittered until you felt a fever? Did the rude weasel ask you to pay for the drinks like you weren’t a lady? Tony fled north toward home, glad to get away whole, and all alone you went to the Casa Verde with your first Mexican Bub and … did he call you
puta
while you blew him?
Convicted in Mexico, then disappeared from prison at Christmas of 1970, and there’s never been another photo of her above the fold for me to view and cherish. Killed by guards? Did the family of the dead man pay for her escape so they could execute her as they saw fit? Or did she make it to Honduras where by coincidence her lawyer owned seventeen thousand acres? That’s plenty of jungle.
I feel her yet alive and no longer in Honduras. I feel her relocated to a brownstone overlooking Brush Creek, laughing to herself every morning as she exercises in Loose Park, a spry lady with a reshaped face and a loping gait. I feel … a wish, an old, lost wish, that she’d seen me once on the corner with my neck bared and my soul craving, understood me at a glance, had me for a snack, let me sleep hugging the pillow with her stink in the threads, then dispatched me about four a.m.; at the peak of my life, the existential summit, removed me from the herd, snuffed perfectly, before the horror unfolds. The fifty years of trudging bored flat toward an eternity of the dull; deader while standing than her victims laying underground, never feeling a timeless blade or seeing the goodbye flash from a barrel; never so alive as that one night you didn’t have when the wolf had at you in the old Muehlebach and murder was in the air with desire and despair and every vessel pumped inside your chest until you and the wild came together at that spot where the pale and dark worlds kiss and love is in the deed if not the word.
BY
M
ATTHEW
E
CK
41st and Walnut
for James Crumley
I first met Alice four years ago in Kansas City at a conference for people affected by violent crimes. She was the daughter of a serial killer who had murdered forty-five women on the West Coast, and I was the son of a serial killer who had murdered fourteen people on the East Coast. We’d only gone to the conference because we’d both recently moved to Kansas City to get away from those who associated our names with the criminal way. It was our first and last attempt at one of those gatherings. There were more people there than you would imagine.
We met at the bar in the lobby of the Hyatt on the last day of the conference and then spent the next two weeks in and out of each other’s beds. But we were a wreck together, and knew it. Our grief followed us kiss to kiss and bed to bed, so we agreed at last to leave each other alone.
Then last year, the day after her father died, she called me and asked if I wanted to meet for drinks at The Cashew. She said there was a movie she wanted to see that was showing tomorrow at the art house near 20th and Grand. She asked if I’d like to see it with her before we went out for drinks. I said I would.
The last big storm of the year moved through the city the night before we met. Two feet of snow fell in three hours. I watched it from the window of my apartment. I’d wanted to see her in all those intervening years that fell between our first parting. I watched the snowfall and tried to caress my emotions with a twelve-pack of beer. There was a point in the night where the electricity went out for about an hour. I lived in an apartment building at the corner of 41st and Walnut. From my window I could see that the lights were still on over the Plaza and north toward Midtown.
I laced up a pair of my old army boots and went out front with a can of beer so that I could measure the snow for myself with a good walk. I peered up into the falling snow and imagined myself an animal in the wild. A buck, a horse, a pig, a fox. I wanted to see the stars. I wanted to feel placed in my heart. But I couldn’t see them because there was still too much light in the other parts of the city.
I threw the beer can toward the door of the apartment building and walked toward the Art Institute. It felt good to walk in the snow with my breath blooming in front of me. The campus was dark from the outage. I had wanted to see the lights that usually guided someone across campus. School was out for the winter, so it was quiet. I crossed to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and stood in the middle of the large lawn. A few cars hummed past in the street. Mine were the first prints in the snow.
“Where now?” I whispered to the sky. I took a step and turned myself in a circle, forcing a smile. “Who now?”
There are days we must feel as far from ourselves as the ocean feels from the moon.
Let me admit it here, I missed her when she was not around. Yes, we had parted ways, but we had never resolved anything. She said as much. Two weeks together had left us shattered against the rocks of the other. But I wanted more shattering. I wanted a year of her. I wanted a year and a day, at least.
Let me admit this as well, Alice was never her real name.
Boys, note this well: women make poor receptacles for your dreams.
Girls, note this well: men make poor receptacles for your dreams.
We are not chalices to be filled with hope.
