Kansas City Noir (26 page)
“Men and women of Kansas City, today you are going to see—and hear—some of the most revolutionary science that man has ever devised. So prepare yourselves for the impossible.”
First they set up the phonograph. A baritone voice bellows in operatic Italian, from the very walls it seems, followed by a procession of voices and a swelling music. I guess the Folly is going swanky after all. At first I think that they must have a chorus and band hidden beneath the stage, the way that, I’m told, magicians will hide doves and rabbits in cages underneath the planks of wood; but then he shuts off the machine, and all that’s left is the ghost of an echo.
Then, while the mustachioed gentleman is doing his demonstration of incandescence, one of the ushers takes the stage and whispers in the ear of his assistant. After the next bout of applause the mustache steps forward and says, “The proprietors of the Folly Theater have asked me to make a public announcement. During yesterday’s Wild West show, a valuable and rare Revolutionary War musket was stolen off the back of Winnifred the sharpshooter’s wagon trailer. Anyone with information leading to the return of the firearm and the arrest of the man who stole it will receive a considerable reward. Now, on with the show!”
I don’t stand up and leave the theater abruptly because to do so right after such an announcement would implicate me; but I am sorely tempted. I need to find and warn Toke, then I need to strangle the bastard for trying to unload his ill-gotten gains on me.
* * *
The next day, as we get ready to open, I gather the family together—by blood and by labor—and we sit around quiet, waiting for Winston, who used to be a roughneck with me in the ironworking days before The Climax, and who now serves as the doorkeeper. Finally Winston lumbers in and pulls back a chair. Winston’s sort is an indispensable friend when you live and work in the Bottoms. I lead off: “I have something to say. Not one of you is gonna talk to the law today or any day. Even if they’re offering a hundred dollars for information about that gun. It don’t matter. If they ask,
Have you seen a man walking around with a Revolutionary War musket in his arms?
you just laugh in their faces. They’ll get used to it. Understand?”
“You ain’t gonna back the bastard, are you?” Tom says. “You might as good get hauled off to jail.”
“Shut your bone box, Tom. This ain’t your fight,” I reply.
“I knew this business would bite you back,” says John automatically, and even he seems to sense that his sanctimonious posture has gone, perhaps, too far. Folks are staring at the two of us, and Winston lifts his eyebrow.
Tom starts to pipe up, but I show him a finger. “Take whatever you were about to say and pocket it, Tommy.” Then I turn to John. “You can condemn my immortal soul to your heart’s content, Johnny,” I tell him, “but say nothing to the law about the musket.”
At that, we all stand up, ready to get to work. Just then Whelan, who we hardly noticed sitting on the stool at the bar’s end, stands up, sober as a churchwoman, and says, “I seen that boy Toke with the same one.”
It’s such a shock to see him on his feet, that between registering the quick pace of his speech and taking in the size of him, we’re all of us still and silent as the shadows of houses.
“TJ, Mike, John, Gil, Winston, go do the books,” I say, and the five men—a couple of them just boys—move to the back room and give us the floor of the saloon.
Standing off with Irish, I notice for the first time that he’s a hairline above my six feet. “What’re you playing at, Whelan?”
“I’m not playing at all, you old rusty guts. When you put down a month’s wages on a longshot and the horse came in first place, Jim, that was your day.” He breathes on his hands as though it’s cold in the saloon. His first day without firewater in so many years, his body doesn’t know how to make its own warmth. “Today I heard somebody’d pay a hundred dollars for a piece of information that I happen to know, so today is my day.”
“Listen good, peckerwood. You didn’t hear what you think you heard,” I say. But damned Whelan has heard me bark before.
“I’m gonna walk out of that door, and I’m gonna go to the authorities. It’s up to you whether you want to stand in my way.”
I step aside.
“Go to the police. I hope you do. They’ll come in here and say,
Jim, your regular Whelan said he saw the musket offered you by a boy by the name of Toke.
And I’ll say,
Sir, that Whelan couldn’t see a hole in a ladder
, and that’ll be the end of it.” I grab the broom, sweep the floor by the entrance, and give him a butler’s bow.
“Winston!” I call out, and the big man steps through the door frame, nearly filling it with his bulk. “Bounce him.”
Winston steps in the room, followed by Tom, and the two of them crowd Whelan out the door. By the morning street among the rushers, Winston says, “I just wish I could see the cops’ faces when the lousiest drunk in Kansas City walks into their station with his tail down and his face busted up from a bar brawl.” The glass doors swing closed, and I can see them, but barely hear them talk.
Whelan touches his cheek, as though expecting to find something there, and says, “But my face is—”
It’s just then that Winston gives him a nose-ender, laying him out on the street.
Tom walks back in the saloon and picks up the broom that I set against the jamb. Then he steps back out holding it halfway down like a baseball club.
* * *
I find Toke on the banks of the Missouri, still skulking around the Bottoms, with the stolen musket hidden in a rolled quilt. I’m just glad he didn’t wash up there like a dead fish.
“The word downtown is you stole that musket,” I say matter-of-factly.
“I left him a coin,” he responds with a laugh that he couldn’t help even if he were sober. Seeing how I’m not laughing, he straightens up good and quick. “Jimmy, you gotta understand. He just left it out there in the back alley. If I didn’t take it, someone else would’ve.”
“But you tried to shed your burden onto me,” I say.
Toke blinks maybe a hundred times.
“It’s okay, Toke. I’ve already seen one man get a hiding today. Besides, you’re a bully trap.”
He smiles like a schoolboy, then corrects himself. “Whelan, was it? The man?”
“Don’t worry who. Man is a loyal creature by nature, and I’m no different. The kind I know that don’t generally follow that line are beneath being called men.”
With that we started walking the seven blocks to The Climax. We went silently, cutting through an uncontrollably red Missouri dusk. At the door, I turned to Toke and shook his hand, then lit my pipe.
“You know, Whelan said my lucky break came on the day Climax won the big race. But he’s wrong about that. Someday I’ll be called for an even higher purpose, and when I am, I’ll need a big family. Are you my family, Toke?”
He nods vigorously, his eyebrows shouting their consent.
“What are we gonna do now?” he asks.
“There ain’t but the one solution,” I say. “Gimme the musket.”
Toke doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t fret with worry over what ills might befall me for taking on his burdens.
After the boy leaves, and the windows have gone dark as scotch ale, I drag one of the barstools behind the counter, climb up so my boots pinch on the upholstery, and in the plain view of thirty men, mount the old musket above the mirror backing. As if to say, I’d do the same for any of you. As though to dare any stranger who walks through the doors of The Climax to just try and boast of their own kindnesses.
Mitch Brian
cocreated and wrote episodes for
Batman: The Animated Series
and cowrote the NBC miniseries
The ‘70s.
He has written screenplays for producers and directors including Chris Columbus, Oliver Stone, Geena Davis, James Ellroy, and Robert Schwentke. His plays are published by Dramatic Publishing and have been produced worldwide. He teaches screenwriting and film studies at the University of Missouri—Kansas City.
Catherine Browder
is a Kansas City–based fiction writer and playwright, with two story collections published:
The Clay That Breathes
and
Secret Lives
. Her plays have been produced regionally and in New York, and her awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Missouri Arts Council. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and is advisory editor for
New Letters
.
Matthew Eck
was recently recognized as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” writers to watch. His novel
The Farther Shore
won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. The novel has been translated into German and Norwegian. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Central Missouri, where he is also a fiction editor for
Pleiades
.
J. Malcolm Garcia
is the author of
The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul
(Beacon, 2009), and
Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron’s Ghost
(Kindle Edition, 2010). His articles have been featured in
Best American Travel Writing
and
Best American Nonrequired Reading
.
John Lutz
is the author of more than forty novels, including
SWF Seeks Same, The Ex, Mister X,
and two private-eye series, one set in St. Louis, the other in Florida. He’s a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and the Private Eye Writers of America, and has won awards from those organizations and others. He lives in St. Louis and Sarasota, Florida.
Phong Nguyen’s
first collection of short stories,
Memory Sickness,
won the 2010 Elixir Press Fiction Award; his stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including
Agni, Beloit Fiction Journal, Boulevard, Florida Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, Meridian,
and
Portland Review.
Formerly editor of
Cream City Review,
he currently serves as editor of
Pleiades,
and is an associate professor of fiction at the University of Central Missouri.
Steve Paul
has worked at the
Kansas City Star
since 1975. As senior writer and arts editor, he writes about music, books, architecture, food, and other subjects. His book
Architecture A to Z: An Elemental, Alphabetical Guide to Kansas City’s Built Environment
was published in 2011. He is coeditor of
War + Ink,
a forthcoming collection of essays on Ernest Hemingway, and a former director of the National Book Critics Circle.
Nadia Pflaum
is a freelance writer and legal investigator in Kansas City. Her nonfiction work has been published in Kansas City’s alt-weekly,
The Pitch
, on
Salon,
and in
Best Music Writing 2008
.
Nancy Pickard
is the author of eighteen popular and critically acclaimed novels, including the Jenny Cain and Marie Lightfoot mystery series. She is a four-time Edgar Award finalist and has won the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, Barry, and Shamus awards. Pickard is a founding member and former president of Sisters in Crime.
Kevin Prufer
is the author of numerous critically acclaimed books of poetry. His mysteries appear in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
,
Crimewave
, and elsewhere. He lived in the greater Kansas City area for fifteen years before moving to Texas, where he is a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Houston.
Andrés Rodríguez
is a native of Kansas City. He is the author of
Night Song
and
Book of the Heart.
In 2007 he won
Poets & Writers’
Maureen Egan Writers Exchange Award for Poetry. His poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as
Harvard Review, Drunken Boat, Cortland Review, Sagetrieb,
and
Palabra.
Linda Rodriguez
is the author of
Every Last Secret
, winner of the Malice Domestic First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, and two award-winning books of poetry,
Heart’s Migration
and
Skin Hunger.
She has received the Midwestern Voices and Visions Award and the Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award. She is a member of Latino Writers Collective, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime.
Philip Stephens
is the author of a novel,
Miss Me When I’m Gone
, and a collection of poems,
The Determined Days
, which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. He lives in Kansas City.
Grace Suh
is a writer and editor who lives in Kansas City. Her work has received awards from the Overbrook Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Ucross Foundation.
Daniel Woodrell
is the author of
Winter’s Bone
and seven other novels, most set in the Missouri Ozarks. His short story collection,
The Outlaw Album,
was published in 2011.
The Akashic Books Noir series was launched in 2004 with the award-winning anthology,
Brooklyn Noir.
Each book is comprised of all new stories, each taking place within a distinct location within the city of the book. Stories in the series have won multiple Edgar, Shamus, and Hammett awards and the volumes have been translated into 10 languages. Every book is available on our website, as eBooks from your favorite vendor, and in print at online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. For more information on the series, including an up-to-date list of available titles, please visit www.akashicbooks.com/noirseries.htm.