Kansas City Noir
This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2012 Akashic Books
Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple
Kansas City map by Aaron Petrovich
Cover photo courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri
eISBN: 978-1-61775-1448
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-128-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012939264
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
Table of Contents
BY
J. M
ALCOLM
G
ARCIA
Troost Lake
BY
K
EVIN
P
RUFER
Country Club Plaza
BY
G
RACE
S
UH
Mission Hills
BY
D
ANIEL
W
OODRELL
12th Street
BY
M
ATTHEW
E
CK
41st and Walnut
BY
P
HILIP
S
TEPHENS
Midtown
BY
C
ATHERINE
B
ROWDER
Northeast
BY
L
INDA
R
ODRIGUEZ
South Troost
BY
J
OHN
L
UTZ
West 8th Street
BY
N
ANCY
P
ICKARD
The Paseo
BY
A
NDRÉS
R
ODRÍGUEZ
Milton’s Tap Room
BY
M
ITCH
B
RIAN
The Celluloid City
BY
N
ADIA
P
FLAUM
18th and Vine
BY
P
HONG
N
GUYEN
West Bottoms
Also in the Akashic Noir Series
Papa’s Blues
It was winter when a young newspaper reporter, recently back from the war in Europe, holed up in a rooming house in Michigan and turned his mind back to Kansas City.
He churned out a story of the kind he hoped one of the magazines would want. There was a murder. There was a mild-mannered newspaper man named Punk Alford. And there was an anguished, effete suspect who stroked a sword’s edge as if it were … well, you know.
Whether the budding author mailed that early effort to the
Saturday Evening Post
or any other magazine is unknown. But the story was never published, so Ernest Hemingway’s future reputation was spared embarrassment and his apprenticeship in writing continued a few more years.
Hemingway, of course, later penned some of the great noir ur-tales of the 1920s and ‘30s, notably “The Killers” and
To Have and Have Not
. Lesser known among Hemingway’s fictional record are murky-toned stories such as “A Pursuit Race,” about a wigged-out heroin addict, and “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen,” featuring a castration, both of which share two significant things with the unpublished Punk Alford story—namely, an origin and a setting in Kansas City.
Hemingway was eighteen years old in October 1917 when he arrived in Kansas City from a Chicago suburb to become a reporter at the
Kansas City Star
. For the next six and a half months, before he decamped to join the ambulance service in Italy, Hemingway discovered, while chasing ambulance surgeons and cops, what we still know: the streets of Kansas City are paved with dark tales aplenty.
Kansas City is a crossroads. East meets West and North meets South here. Since its settlement in the first half of the nineteenth century, Kansas City has represented a place of opportunity, optimism, and ornery behavior. It outfitted travelers and dreamers on the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon trails. It grew on cattle, grain, and lumber. It nurtured Jesse James, jazz, and gin-slinging scoundrels.
When I put out the call for contributions to this collection, I imagined we’d produce tributaries to a fictional stream that extends from nineteenth-century cowboy novels, through Hemingway’s brand of gritty tales, and to the contemporary, unsparing visions of his successors. (For a taste of period Kansas City pulp at its peak, try finding—it’s not easy—a copy of
Tuck’s Girl
, a paperback novel published in 1952 by another onetime
Kansas City Star
reporter, Marcel Wallenstein.) I deliberately failed to define “noir” to prospective contributors. As previous anthologies in this series have shown quite effectively, the term represents a big tent. So here you will indeed find serial killers, moral turpitude, and police detectives at work. But you are just as likely to encounter quieter tales of inner turmoil, troubled reflection, and anxiety. The heart in stress can lead people to unpredictable and midnight-blue places.
In “Cat in a Box,” Kevin Prufer’s veteran detective/protagonist is on the trail of a killer while his own body threatens to change the course of his life and career.
In Nancy Pickard’s “Lightbulb,” a woman climbs deep into regret and guilt over an old memory. Pickard’s story also negotiates the long shadow of Kansas City’s racial divide, as does Linda Rodriguez’s tale of a widower trying to maintain his life’s order in a time of upheaval and collision.
Some stories within evoke real places and people, though just a reminder—this is a collection of fiction, not history. In “Come Murder Me Next, Babe,” Daniel Woodrell, master of Missouri noir, imagines a femme fatale who may resonate with Kansas City readers of a certain age. And in setting “Yesterdays” in Milton’s Tap Room, Andrés Rodríguez imagines an alternate history for the much beloved bootlegger, bar owner, and friend to jazz, who died in 1983. (Milton’s, a noirish bar if there ever was one, I add with great affection, also shows up as a touchstone in Philip Stephens’s troubling and trenchant Midtown tale, “You Shouldn’t Be Here.”)
By contrast, Nadia Pflaum invents a barbecue legacy that may or may not sound like a real Kansas City institution. (We repeat: any resemblance to real people …) And Phong Nguyen steps into that nineteenth-century dime-novel current to imagine an episode from the earlier days of political machinist Jim Pendergast and his famous Climax Saloon.
Some stories take liberties with geography and specific places, which, of course, is the prerogative of fiction writers. Local readers can make their own gotcha lists, though I trust they will do so with a smile and nonetheless recognize their city’s pulse reverberating in these pages.
First-time visitors to Kansas City usually note with surprise the greenery and the winding, hilly topography of our sprawling, two-state metropolitan area. Yet even the City Beautiful foliage and suburban finery can hide crime and lives of moral weakness, as Grace Suh displays in “Mission Hills Confidential.”
Tourists and locals alike love their sports here, their slow-smoked ribs, their shopping, and the gab that goes on at neighborhood bars. Walking on the wild side is a long tradition here too, evidence of the full range of Kansas City’s human condition. Our lineup of fine writers explores that condition in numerous and compelling ways. Through wintry chill. Through moonlit mystery. And often, befitting our literary and musical heritage, through singing the blues.
Steve Paul
Kansas City
June 2012
H
EARTLAND
BY
J. M
ALCOLM
G
ARCIA
Troost Lake
Evening
Fran’s at night school studying for her associate’s degree. I don’t feel like watching TV so I get out the knife one of the interpreters gave me in Kandahar and start throwing it at the wall. He said he got it off the body of a bad guy who blew himself up laying an IED in the road, but I think he stole it off one of our guys, because it’s a Gerber and it doesn’t look like it was in any explosion. The terp could throw it and stick it every time. I’m not that good, but I throw it at the wall anyway. I can do it for hours.
I was a contractor over in Kandahar. Electrician. Worked there for twelve months. When my year was up, I flew home to Kansas City and took up with Fran and a couple of months later moved in with her. Mr. Fix It, the soldiers called me. Did some plumbing too. A little out of my league, but at two hundred tax-free grand a year I was more than willing to say I could do anything. I got used to the noise: mortars, sniper fire, return fire, .50-calibers, AKs, generators grinding all night, guys living on top of each other telling dead baby and fag jokes. Awful quiet now that I’m back. Behind Fran’s house, I hear buses turn off Prospect and onto 39th Street, drone past and slice into the night until I don’t hear anything again. The knife helps. I like the steady repetition of tossing it. The precision of it. Like fly fishing. Gene understood. He fought in Korea.
The trick with the knife, I told Gene, is you got to establish a rhythm. You do that and the silence becomes part of the flow and the
plink
the knife makes when it enters the wall interrupts the silence, and the small suck sound it makes when you pull it out, and then the silence again until you throw it, again and again.
Right, Gene said.
Next day
This is the third week I haven’t seen Gene at Mike’s Place. Out of all the regulars, he’s the only one missing.
Melissa isn’t here but we all know where she is. A public defender, Melissa has a court case this afternoon. I overheard her tell Lyle yesterday she would be working late. And Lyle? He may have a job painting or installing a countertop or a new floor or fixing someone’s shitter. What I’m saying is, Lyle’s around. He’s a handyman. He’ll be in later, as will his buddy Tim.