Kansas City Noir (7 page)
What her father did all day was harder to answer. Enormous, heavy, cut-glass ashtrays the size of candy bowls in hues of topaz and amber were set all around the house, dozens of them. The ones most often filled and even overflowing with half-smoked butts, as though the by-product of great industry, occupied the corner of the giant leather-topped desk in the dark library downstairs, and the center of the white Parsons cube between the boxy microsuede Italian lounge chairs in the study off his bedroom upstairs. What was he doing while all this smoking took place?
Managing accounts
, that was the only phrase she ever heard. Stacks of manila folders spilled next to ashtrays. And everywhere there were telephones—the heavy, old-fashioned kind with long, tangled cords—well into the 1980s. He smoked and talked on those phones.
Morris Gould was born in that house. His father, Harmon, had it built himself in the late 1940s, from the proceeds of a fur and real estate business that disappeared sometime in the interim. When they drove around downtown her father might gesture toward an empty and abandoned department store or pharmacy building with his cigarette and say, “Dad owned that one,” or, “He sold that one in the ‘60s, when all this was empty. Made almost nothing.”
The family were suspect in Mission Hills from the start—Jews. So what, screw them. Harmon got around the Jew-excluding covenants by paying a third party to buy the land and build the house as if for himself. Like all Jews they were barred from the club down the road—her dad called it the KKKC Country Club. When he was young his parents were members at Oakwood, but by the time she came along he’d dropped the membership. Too far from home.
There were lots of Jews in Mission Hills by then, at Sunset Hill too. Not that she was considered one, being plainly not. At school she was friends mostly with Priya, a girl only three years removed from Delhi, whose parents were residents at the university hospital. It was a friendship she never thought to carry off the grounds. After school the other girls gaggled off in twos and threes and fours, to slumber parties and birthday parties and swim meets. The world of tennis skirts and tartan headbands and sunshine was not for her. She looked forward every day to returning to the murky depths and heavy, unbestirred air of their house. Loved the dense, voluminous falls of velvet drapery that rippled over the casement windows and pooled on the floor and could barely be pushed aside, loved the dark ornamental woodwork and paneling, the soothing silence and room after room empty of people.
On weekends, when it was only the two of them, it was enough just to sit for hours in solitude, exquisitely aware of all that uninhabited, enveloping space, feeling in perfect company, knowing that her father sat, also in solitude, also in great peace, down a long hallway, or downstairs. The metric tons of buffering brick and stone, plateaus of marble, the scant two acres of groomed, densely planted grounds, too steeply sloped to be usable for outdoor recreation—everything about the house suited them perfectly.
Which is to say that she understood, perfectly, why her father did what they say he did, what he was convicted of doing, what they put him in jail for. Why it was necessary. How could they live any other way? How could the house not be theirs? He did it for her. The censure of the public didn’t bother her, their easy judgment, their shunning. She has never cared what they thought. They don’t understand anything, not what is important.
The assets were dissolved while her father was in prison, so he didn’t have to see the house put on the market, and the horrific estate sale with the invasion of slovenly bargain hunters, swarming like sweatpanted ants, grasping boxes of silverware and resting Royal Derby tureens on their beer guts. It was her senior year at KU. She skipped classes and drove over from Lawrence to watch. What was worse, that hundreds grubbed through her mother’s pristine Jaeger and St. John’s wool jersey and bouclé suits? Or that in the end most of her mother’s clothing—bought in the smallest size and tailored even tinier around her narrow bird waist—went unsold and was dumped at the thrift store?
The house was sold to a guy who flipped it two years later at a huge profit, and for nearly a year construction trucks trundled in and out of the driveway. They said the entire interior was nearly gutted and reconstructed, the main floor “opened up, for casual entertaining.” Desecration. Paradise renovated. Even the lawn was terraced, many of the trees taken down. More opening up.
Her father’s sentence was five years, reduced to three for good behavior and because, in the second year, the cancer was discovered. Brandi should have listened to Britt’s story more carefully, because what Morris Gould did not do was die in jail. He received the first course of treatment in the prison clinic, but they let him out for what turned out to be his last four months. It was almost better when he was in prison. At least there his medical care was paid for, his meals provided. He had no insurance by that time, and everything had to be paid out of pocket. There was a trust from Allison’s grandfather, who’d generously and promptly set it up at her adoption at age twenty months, fortunately so, since he died shortly after. And another trust created by her father that was also left intact. From these she bought the medications and paid the hospital bills, and then the funeral bills, and at the end was left with enough to afford a condo in downtown Chicago, where she had found a job as a cog in a Big Eight accounting firm—quite a delicious irony for the daughter of a white-collar felon. This is the glory of America, where the crimes of the father are not visited upon his child. Except in gossip, of course. That is a life sentence.
The ironic job was soon after resigned, the Wrigleyville condo unbought; for Priya, by then a dermatology fellow in Phoenix, had flown in for the funeral, and when they were out to dinner together the next evening to catch up, they ran into Britt Fuller, whom Priya knew slightly from KU Med. Britt had graduated from medical school with Priya, but dropped out of residency the next year. He’d been a nontraditional student anyway, having entered on a lark at age thirty-five after a young adulthood of rich-boy bumming. The way he put it, the car repair part of medicine wasn’t interesting enough for the twenty-four-hour shifts. Not worth staying up for, he joked.
Britt was also an only child, also an orphan, of a family whose three-generations-old firm manufactured road resurfacing machinery. Britt was a year out of Rockhurst when his father had the heart attack. His mother died two months later, in an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease on the Caribbean cruise she was taking as relief from her bereavement. Britt has nothing to do with the company, but because of the family’s controlling share (a paternal uncle, who lives in Seattle and practices craniosacral healing, is the only other beneficiary), he has no need to seek employment.
Allison knew he was rich right away, before she learned any of this. No obvious markers. No watch. So-so wallet. His physical appearance was that of a corrupt old-timey banker, with his thick, prematurely silver hair, solid girth, and square, not unhandsome head, but he dressed like a character out of
The Matrix
, in black leather pants, a long black leather coat, and pointy black boots with too much heel, acres of leather on his ample frame. At the very least, it was an unusual look for a Plaza restaurant on a Thursday night. Chatting with Priya, he grabbed their bill folder from the waitress and stuffed in a stack of cash, way more than enough, without so much as glancing at the total. An obnoxious thing to do. Priya raised an eyebrow, but Allison didn’t mind. Her father might have done the same. Already she was taken by Britt’s air of complete indifference, the prick demeanor of one beholden to no one. It’s something that can’t be cultivated or pretended. It means money. Piles and piles. Lettuce. Lucre. Spondulicks, as her father used to say.
Britt was forty-one. She was twenty-six. A not indecent age spread. He should have been one of the most eligible bachelors in KC. Never married. Independent fortune—not as many of those in town as you’d think. And he was not quite fat yet, although he was getting there fast. But there was something off about him, and no one wanted him. Maybe it was the schizophrenic wardrobe, shifting from one ridiculous costume to the next: the black leather thing and a punk look with tight red pants and combat boots and a strange gaucho thing, with pleated shirts and embroidered vests and hats. There was barely a normal item in his closet. It was as though he deliberately chose clothing that highlighted his ever-increasing plumpness and inner instability.
She didn’t mind. Any of it. Not the way he leaked involuntary noises—little unprotected moans and sighs, like an infant fitfully sleeping—as though in private moments he immediately reverted to attending to long-nourished inner complaints and slights. Not the way his hand felt grabbing her breast—heavy and possessive but also oddly careless, a general undirected pawing. This led to rapid, panicked humping, and when he came, he yelled, and collapsed on her with huge heaving gasps and wrapped his giant self around her neat body.
Everything about her was smooth and sleek. Her small pretty hands with their shiny polished nails. Her smooth, surprisingly solid legs, free of hair and ripples and veins. Her smooth concave belly that never grew. They used no birth protection but nothing ever happened. That was fine. Britt never mentioned children. And she had never wanted so much as a pet. She had what she wanted. They lived in the house Britt grew up in, only a street away from her old house. It was also a Tudor, laid out almost the same. She changed nothing in it, except to put up blinds in the south-facing windows.
You could say she married Britt for his money, but that wouldn’t be exactly true. She married him for a security for which money was necessary but not sufficient, for a solid feeling of returning to what was rightfully hers. To live any other way would have felt like fraud, and the oddness of him, his lack of friends, the way he was set at an angle to the rest of the world—that was something to return to also. Besides, she felt always profound gratitude for how little he cared, when he learned who her father was. Being morally off himself, he didn’t judge.
There was, at the core of their strange union, a unity. Once, when he and a filmmaking buddy drove past the old Gould house, now with so many trees removed, more visible to the street than before, and spreading impressively high and wide on the rise, the buddy gestured at it with his thumb: “Guy who used to own that chiseled millions, story made the
Wall Street Journal
.” Not realizing that he was speaking to the son-in-law of the late villain himself. When Britt reported this to Allison, there was a certain surge in his voice, a jocularity he could not tamp, not all the way, that spoke of a joy he should not have felt. All the same, the fact that he told her suggested a kind of loyalty, a loyalty she cherished more than love.
* * *
But the loyalty is gone. Now there is nothing. She knew it the second Brandi asked her that question. She knew even before that, the minute she saw Brandi, and the way Brandi’s eyes assessed her in such a proprietary way, a rival sizing up the competition.
Allison’s tea is cold. She is still in her workout clothes and running shoes. She took her four-mile walk up and down the hills this morning, same as she does every morning. The usual joggers and mothers pushing three-wheeled strollers saw her and waved. There are fewer exercisers out on weekends than during the week, but still, enough of the regulars saw her to testify if there are police inquiries. She doubts there will be, anyway. This isn’t
Law & Order
. This is Mission Hills. With the emergency room visit two months ago, and Britt’s physical condition and family medical history, no one will question the obvious scenario.
Allison assumes Britt and Brandi have had sex. Or tried. She’s read that coke renders the dick nonfunctional. As for Allison and Britt, not a thing has happened in a long time. Before that, things had dried up to once every several months or so—after all, they’d been married ten years—but he hasn’t made a move toward her in ages.
The question is: would Britt leave Allison, his wife of a decade, for a heavily padded, lightly educated fat girl from Raytown, or wherever she’s from? It’s hard to imagine. He has a class thing as much as Allison does. There are reasons why Britt was a forty-one-year-old bachelor when they met. He is passive and lacking initiative. He favors routine, dislikes change. Still, she can’t take the chance. Not when that girl would snatch him up in a second.
The hands of the sunburst clock on the wall hitch at every five-minute mark. The lilac-print wallpaper behind the breakfront is faded from decades of eastern sun, but that is part of its charm. She doesn’t understand her neighbors’ constant need to renovate and redecorate. She chalks it up to boredom. She and Britt never have guests; no one sees the wallpaper. Even if they did, what does it matter what people think?
She will wait one more hour. At two o’clock she will walk upstairs and into the mint-green guest room. She doesn’t think it likely that he’ll be alive. Whatever she finds, she will dial 911. They will take him away. As for her, she will never be moved from this house.
BY
D
ANIEL
W
OODRELL
12th Street
Sharon’s husband died from boredom—hers, not his. He was a nightshift drone in Raytown who liked the drudgery, wanted only a plain life with his wife and daughter in a box house, slipping toward eternity, neither blamed nor noticed. He slept on the couch most days. The way his mouth jumped open and honked when he slept made her sadness swell—so left out of the pretty world, the world denied her—his lips reminding her of the leavings she scraped off plates into the garbage pail four lunch shifts a week at Catfish Billy’s. She watched her husband, sleeping or awake, eyes fixed on his slack, lumpish lips and receding chin, and thought,
The fucking leavings have followed me home and joined his face. I feel bugs with his smell running loose in my veins!