Kansas City Noir (6 page)
The cat scratched at the box, stuck its paw through one of the air holes, meowed.
And the murderer in the trunk was just coming to—Armand could hear him back there moving, his first half-hearted kicks. Then the sound of the tire iron hitting the wheel wells, fists banging on the ceiling. “Let me out of here!” the murderer called.
Armand wondered if he ever would.
BY
G
RACE
S
UH
Mission Hills
Allison sits in the breakfast room and watches the cardinal pair, male and female, dipping in and out of the holly bushes where they make their home. She avoids this room in the morning—too much sun. But it’s tolerable starting from early afternoon, which it now is, when she can drink her tea and look out the tall windows and watch the shadows sit neatly under the trees like coasters.
Her husband Britt is upstairs in the green guest room. Since winter, when he fell in with a new group of friends, he’s been tumbling into bed at all hours, reeking of vodka and smoke and sweat. A month ago she asked him to use a guest room on nights he goes out, and mostly he remembers. For some reason he eschews the gray one with the nautical theme and king-sized bed in favor of the mint-green one with the Colefax chinoiserie print that swathes the walls, draperies, armchair, and dainty canopy bed.
She doesn’t know if he’s alive. If he isn’t dead, he’s probably close. The last time she saw him was three hours ago, at ten in the morning. He was sprawled on the tall double bed, his great spread-eagled mass covering nearly the whole of it, bedclothes tangled around his legs. He was either OD’ing or unconscious, his hand cold, his breathing shallow, irregular pants. No visible pain or discomfort. No panic like last time. Pants and socks thrown on the floor. She felt for his phone in his pocket and hung the pants on the back of the bathroom door. Most likely the battery was dead, but just in case, this would make it that much harder for him.
The house is so vast, and the walls and floors so solid and thick, that one can barely hear a thing from one room to the next. And the green guest room is over the library, clear on the other side of the house. In the house Allison grew up in, two blocks away, she and her father used the staticky intercom system to reach one another, but this house, though almost as large, is strangely without one.
Last time was two months ago. Allison awoke to screaming. It was six in the morning. A girl was shrieking so hysterically and insistently that the scream’s gauzy overtones managed to travel up and penetrate her deep, early-morning sleep. Allison stumbled downstairs, slippers in hand, following the sound to the kitchen. A young woman and two men were standing over Britt, who lay sprawled on the floor between the island and the double ovens. Allison reached him and he began a kind of convulsion.
“Where’s the shower?” the short guy yelled. “We got to get him in the shower!” As though the problem was that Britt was terribly dirty.
“Sit him up,” said the other guy. He had that shaved head thing that bald guys do, and looked very tall, doubling over to get a closer look at Britt. “He’s choking,” he reported, unnecessarily. Britt was coughing in a retching, erupting way. The tall guy yanked him up and as he did Britt’s eyes opened, the way a baby doll opens its eyes when tilted vertically. His eyeballs swung up and the lids closed again and then they opened and he looked stonily at his feet and said, “Unh uh uh.”
Something about it struck Allison as comical. She almost laughed. Maybe she did. The girl had been kneeling on the floor next to Britt, her fat bare knees sprawled so that her short dress hiked up even shorter, her fat hands clutching her throat as she shrieked, “Do something! Do something!” But at the sight of Allison her face lit up. There was something avid about her, a squirrel’s bright but distracted gaze shifting from emergency to stranger. She scrambled to her feet and lumbered forward, hand thrust out. “I’m Brandi! With an
i
!”
Britt mentioned these new friends sometimes, and weekend plans with them, with a child’s disingenuous glee, but Allison didn’t recall any mention of a girl. She’d figured the all-night techno and cocaine parties to be another of Britt’s misguided temporary enthusiasms, like the brief but equipment-intensive saltwater fish tank winter and the car racing lessons and the filmmaking group.
Brandi was as chunky and plain as a Cabbage Patch Kid. She wore thick, emphatic makeup, massive high heels, and a dress so tight it bunched all around her. Her hips and thighs were enormous. She was young, maybe mid-twenties. What kind of people name a child after a liquor? “That’s Nick,” Brandi said, nodding at the tall man. “And Ilon.”
Britt said, “Uh uh uh.”
“Can you breathe?” Ilon asked.
They never had people over, so it was a shock to see strangers standing around. They’d been there who knows how long. Half-empty drinks littered the counter. Nick reached over and finished one off. There was a little pocket mirror at the far end, by the beverage sink, with a rolled-up bill beside it. That struck her as funny too. Like an ‘80s movie prop.
“That’s a lot of granite,” Brandi said, following Allison’s eyes.
“Marble,” Allison said. “Calacatta Oro.”
“No,” Britt gasped. “Can’t breathe.”
“Isn’t granite better?” Brandi said. “Doesn’t stain and stuff?”
Ilon pounded Britt on the back, like something had gone down the wrong way. “Britt!” he yelled, “Britt!” Or like Britt was suddenly deaf.
Ilon and Nick dragged him two rooms over to the library, Britt’s bulk listing between the tall, bald man and the short, hairy man. They leaned him back on one of the red brocade sofas and everyone grouped around and watched him breathe. His skin looked white and damp as poached fish. He reached over with his right hand and walked his fingers over the dome of his torso to his heart. For a second it looked as though he was going to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But instead he said, “My arm. Arm. Allison.”
The three looked at her and Allison turned and ran upstairs. She put on clothes and running shoes and grabbed her purse and phone, and when she got back to the library Britt was staggering back and forth before the fireplace with his right hand still over his heart. “I’m dying,” he said. “My heart won’t stop.”
“Okay,” Allison said. “You should get in the car.”
No one moved.
“I need help,” she said.
Brandi went to the kitchen and returned with a giant purse made of shiny white leatherette. It was suddenly awkward, like a dinner party dispersing after an unforgivable scene. Ilon and Nick pushed Britt out the front door and into the back of Allison’s car. Nick pulled the seat belt shoulder strap down but Britt shook his head violently no. His right hand was still stuck over his heart. “Nothing,” he said.
Nick and Ilon got into the front of their car, parked behind Allison’s Land Rover in the circular drive. Brandi stood with her hand on the Nissan’s back door, watching Allison walk around. She gave her a little wave. “So is your dad the guy,” she called in a conversational tone, “the one who died in jail?”
* * *
There was an hour wait before a triage nurse showed Britt down a corridor and up onto a gurney closely enclosed by polyester drapes. It was like being in a motel shower with two other people. Britt seemed revived by the imminence of medical care. He’d even made the walk from the waiting area by himself.
“What’s the problem?” the nurse asked.
“Overdose,” Britt said. Allison was surprised at his plain-speaking. “I had a heart attack or something from an overdose.”
The nurse took his vitals. She inquired what substances he’d taken. Coke? Yes. How much. A lot. Two or three lines, repeated several times over the course of the night. Ecstasy? Two. Meth? No. Heroin? No. Other opiates—Percocet, Percodan, Vicodin, OxyContin? One pill of something, at the beginning of the evening. Alcohol? Vodka tonics. Maybe five.
The nurse disappeared and no one came back for a long time. This must mean no dire danger. Britt seemed to think so too, because he cheered up. Flat on the gurney, he listened alertly to various commotions taking place around them. After a while he propped himself up on his elbows—a remarkably strenuous pose for one so hefty and so recently collapsed. He dug in his shorts pocket for his phone and took a glance. “No juice,” he muttered. He turned to Allison with a bright smile. “Do you mind getting me something to drink? And some kind of snack? I need salt. Oh, and a magazine from the waiting room?”
Allison said nothing. She pointedly took her own phone out of her purse, having been reminded of its useful distractions, and resumed a game on the
New York Times
crossword app.
What she minded most was that stupid fat slut’s invocation of her father. She didn’t deserve to as much as speak of him. It wasn’t just that this was the first time, in a very long time, a decade or more, that anyone had the stupidity and lack of tact to mention her father to her directly, it was also that the girl must have heard the story from Britt, meaning that he had betrayed her, wronged her, unforgivably.
“Do you hear me?” Britt said. He didn’t notice that she hadn’t yet said a word to him all morning. “Allison, water, I need water.”
“You could have died,” Allison said at last. “Next time, you will.”
“I know, yes,” Britt said. He thinks she is nagging—not predicting, not telling him. “I’ll be more careful.”
He won’t, she thought. It’s only a matter of time, probably days, before he’s back to the usual. Whatever Britt is, he’s not moderate. He drinks a lot. Smokes a lot. His favorite foods are Town Topic cheeseburgers and onion rings, his second favorite giant platters of pasta piled with meat sauce and melted cheese at Garozzo’s or Carmen’s. Some mornings he goes and gets an entire flat box of Lamar’s: apple fritters and cinnamon cake donuts and frosted Long Johns filled with whipped cream that has the pearlescent sheen and delightfully slick, frothy mouthfeel of nondairy, highly artificial ingredients. His own dad died of a massive coronary at age fifty-one, Britt’s age now.
At the emergency room, he was told to return for follow-up EKGs and to make an appointment with a cardiologist, but he never did. No matter what she does or doesn’t do today, the amount she’s shortening his life is probably not appreciable.
* * *
Even now, fifteen years after his death, people talk about her dad—nasty, hypocritical things. To hear them, you’d think this fair town was a stranger to financial malfeasance, rather than a regular hornets’ nest of it. She could drive up and down the pleasant lanes of the neighborhood and point out mansion after lovely mansion bought and paid for with embezzlement, blackmail, exploitation, and every other kind of scoundrel behavior and white-collar criminal activity, felony-class and otherwise. Certainly her father wasn’t the first nor the last from this town to be sent to the minimum security facility in Minnesota.
The talk is idly malign, the chatter of strangers, not directed at her.
They just bought a house on that block, you know, the Mission Hills Swindler Street.
Or
Bold as Gould.
Stuff like that. Local color.
To Allison, Morris Gould was a good father, a good parent. The only one she had, really. Her mother was sick from as early as Allison could remember, had been her entire adult life. Hence Allison’s adoption.
Mostly what Allison remembers is her mother leaning listless at the breakfast table after chemo, lips cracked, or sitting motionless in a wicker chaise in the solarium, wrapped in a quilted satin robe—the robe vermillion, the chaise cobalt, its cushions a riot of chintz, the scarf on her head brilliantly printed, her small face beneath, colorless.
She died two days before Allison’s tenth birthday, and then it was Allison and her father in the big Tudor pile on Verona. Consuelo came Monday through Friday, seven in the morning to butter Allison’s toast. Her father drove her to school, a terrycloth Chiefs robe over his pajamas, shearling slipper mocs on his bare feet, window cracked an inch even in freezing weather as a purely symbolic, wholly ineffectual nod to the smoke billowing from his Pall Mall. If anything, the slipstream pushed the smoke to the passenger side, rather than allowing it to waft over his head. He didn’t generally commence conversation until sometime around lunch, but as he pulled up to Sunset Hill, he’d throw her a winking, cigarette-clenched smile and pat her shoulder as she slid out of the beat-up Jaguar.
He was there again in the afternoon, one of the few fathers in the line of pickup parents. Even in winter he’d be outside, leaning against the car, Soviet spy-chic in ushanka and sunglasses, puffing on a cigarette, hands plunged deep into the pockets of his Mongolian-wool overcoat. Sometimes underneath he’d still be in his pajamas and Chiefs robe.
Consuelo waited until Allison got home so she could give her a kiss on the hairline before she left for the day. She referred to her as
pobrecita
and did what she could to assuage the sorrow and void she imagined was life without a mother, mostly by starching her clothes so stiffly they could barely be pulled off the hangers, and cooking and baking enough for lumberjacks. The house was so big she had enough to do just rotating through the unused rooms, vacuuming and waxing floors and dusting banisters and shining the leaves on the plants in the solarium and rolling up rugs and sending them out to be cleaned. No one ever went up to the third floor, once a ballroom, which was dimly lit and piled with old furniture and boxes of papers and books, nor to the moldering stone-walled basement, a tangle of ancient bicycles and sports equipment from her father’s youth, metal parts rusted and leather straps cracked.
Her mother’s dry cleaner–bagged clothing stayed hanging in her closet, tissue-stuffed handbags and wooden-treed shoes and tissue-wrapped cardigans stacked by color remaining on the shelves. In the drawers of the peach dressing room, her lipsticks were lined up by tube length. In the endless silence of the afternoons Allison sometimes sat in the gold scroll-work vanity chair and stroked waxy lipsticks on her lips, but her mother had been blond, with a pink complexion and neat mouth, a Pat Nixon type. On Allison’s olive skin, round Asian face, and full lips, the frosty pinks and gold-sparkled corals looked garish and improbable.