Kansas City Noir

by Steve Paul

  But these new bodies—these bodies in the trunks of cars, their little cloth images dropped in mailboxes—they hit him in a stranger place. They weren’t mysterious at all, he decided, feeling the dull ache working his arms and legs, feeling his foot shift, unbidden. They’d died immobile too, injected and immobile. He was going to go like that—a prisoner in his own body, unable to move, unable to do anything at all. And when they closed the trunk on him for good, when the light failed—

  Now, driving around and around in the Crown Vic, watching the snow pretty up the midnight sidewalks, he wanted to get out of the car and stab the Dollmaker. He hated him like he hated the quickly degenerating cells in his slowly failing brain. He didn’t want to know the Dollmaker’s story. He didn’t want to know anyone’s story.

  He wanted the fucker dead.

  * * *

  When Lamar woke up, he was sure the guy was missing those two fingers. When he’d waved, his hand looked like a claw. Why hadn’t he remembered that right away? Why hadn’t he said it to the officer right away?

  “You took the bus here to tell me that?” Armand asked, leaning back on his desk chair. He’d quickly put away the crime scene photos when the kid arrived, shoulders still dusted with snow.

  Lamar nodded.

  “Why didn’t you just call?”

  “I got no phone.” He shrugged. The truth was, he wanted to see the station, wanted to come in person to make things right.

  “And aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “I guess.” The kid looked out Armand’s office window, onto 27th Street. “I don’t always go.”

  But Armand was smiling the whole time, so Lamar wasn’t worried. “And you’re sure the guy was missing two fingers, right?”

  The kid nodded.

  “The pinky finger and the ring finger?” Armand held his hand out, curling those fingers down so his hand looked like a claw.

  “I’m pretty sure,” the kid said. “I dreamed about it last night, but I’m pretty sure.”

  So what if the kid couldn’t pick the freak’s picture out of a photo lineup—“I don’t really remember his face, just the hand,” Lamar had said—what did it matter? How many perps were there in Kansas City with access to pharmaceuticals and missing those two fingers? It had to be William Steingart.

  So Armand drove the kid home in his Crown Vic. And the kid asked again when he could have his cat back and Armand told him soon, soon. “The cat’s fine,” he said. “They’re feeding him real good. Tuna and milk. It’ll be fat and happy when you see it next. Just another day or so.”

  * * *

  Steingart was a registered nurse, a sweet, lean, clean-cut bastard of forty-plus who smelled of Axe deodorant and something like playdough. When Armand asked how he’d lost the fingers, he smiled kindly, said he’d bet them away. “You should see what the other guy lost,” he said. But when Jackson raised his eyebrows, Steingart demurred: “I fell, put my fist through a window. It was years ago. In St. Louis. Not such an interesting story, I’m afraid. But it doesn’t slow me down any.”

  Steingart smiled through the whole interview, his chair tipped back. He was voluble, cheerful. He noted Armand’s tremor, noted the scar that ran along Jackson’s cheek. He told them about his wife, who taught fourth grade in Leawood. He told them about his car, how the heater was dead and he froze all the way here. “Anything to help you fellows out,” he said.

  And when Armand asked about how he was doing with his treatment, Steingart smiled, said he took it one day at a time. “You know, you’re never really free of those thoughts,” he said. “You just learn to control them. You learn not to act on them. To stay away from certain temptations. When they get too strong, I call my support team.”

  “Right,” Armand said.

  “I haven’t done anything like that in years,” Steingart said. “Not anything.” But the guy’s smile was weird, it was off, it was, Armand thought, hinky.

  “You been driving a white Toyota Camry recently?” Armand asked.

  Steingart thought about that one for a beat too long. “Nope,” he answered.

  “What about a ‘97 Honda Civic, dark blue?”

  “I drive a Chevy Impala,” Steingart said.

  “You been hanging around near Bannister Mall at all?”

  Again, Steingart appeared to think about it. “Bannister Mall’s closed. There’s nothing down there.”

  “What about Prospect Ave. and 67th?”

  “Near Research Medical?”

  “Yeah, near there.”

  “Now and then,” Steingart said. “You know, there’s a place I like to eat up there, Salaam Cafe.”

  Jackson crossed his legs, looked at Armand.

  Armand grew flushed. His fingers tingled. His thighs ached. Then he looked out the window at the snow. “You kill those people?” he asked at last.

  Jackson coughed.

  “What people?” Steingart said, a faint half-smile playing over his lips.

  “You know what people.”

  Jackson coughed again.

  Steingart just smiled. He looked right into Armand’s eyes and smiled and smiled. He wouldn’t stop smiling, not even when Armand asked him again, not even when Armand got out of his chair, walked around the table, and grabbed him by the lapels and shouted into his face, “Did you kill those people? Did you kill them?”

  And then Jackson was pulling him away, was saying, “Cool it, man. Cool it.” And Steingart smiled that strange affectless smile.

  And it was true, they didn’t have a thing to hold him on. They couldn’t even get a warrant on what they had: a kid who may have dreamed the missing fingers.

  “I’ve had quite a day,” Steingart said as he rose from his chair to leave.

  “What?” Armand was still flushed, his legs unsteady.

  “Real busy,” he said, and before Armand could react, the man took his hand in his claw and shook it cordially.

  * * *

  Around and around Armand drove as the snow piled up. When he hit the pothole on the corner of 47th and Pennsylvania, he heard a knocking. Now and then, the cat scratched at the box. It was, Armand hoped, still a little drugged from its surgery. It let out a loud, deep meow.

  The car rode low in the gathering snow.

  Armand was thinking now about that fourth doll, the one Elizabeth Wallace’s father found in the mailbox just that morning, not twelve hours ago.

  “She was going to the mall,” he said. “And she texted to say she was staying at Julie’s. It seemed believable.” The man was crying. He did not want to let go of the little cloth doll, the three-inch misshapen image of a pretty, plump redheaded girl of nineteen in jeans and a pink sweater.

  “I’m so sorry,” Armand said.

  “But Julie never talked to her last night. She was never going to Julie’s.”

  The man was twisting the little doll in his hands. Armand reached over, gently took it from him, slipped it into a little plastic bag.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll need a picture of her too. Something recent. Do you have something like that?”

  * * *

  Where had Elizabeth Wallace been going when she was seen last?

  According to her father, she’d been headed toward Oak Park Mall.

  Had anyone seen her in the mall?

  Miller was on it. Melichar was on it. Nguyen was on it. So far, no one in any of the stores she frequented recognized her picture. At least not from the day she disappeared.

  Gas stations? The post office? Blockbuster? Anywhere else she might have stopped on her way to the mall?

  Nothing.

  She’d gotten in her car and disappeared.

  And now it was getting dark, the sky gone from gray to charcoal, and cold. Six o’clock, two days before Christmas. He’d been working since dawn.

  Armand turned to Jackson. “I’m going to get a bite to eat, bring the kid his cat back.” He’d made the cardboard box for the cat that morning. Once it had held reams of off
ice paper.

  Jackson nodded. He was on the phone, on hold. “You coming back?” he asked, covering the mouthpiece.

  “Yeah,” Armand said. “I just need some air.”

  “Bring me a sandwich,” Jackson said. “And a Mountain Dew.”

  “Yeah,” Armand said. “Got it.”

  “You’re not thinking of visiting Steingart, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Stay away from that,” Jackson said. “I’m serious. We got nothing on him. If he did it, we’ll get something on him. But you stay away from him for now.”

  “He did it.”

  “Stay. Away.”

  And he’d meant to do exactly that. He’d picked up the cat downstairs, carried it in the box through the snow to his car, placed it on the front seat. It mewed and scratched in the box beside him as evening continued to fall, as Armand drove up Broadway toward Lamar’s house.

  But all he could think about were Steingart’s last words to him—I’ve had quite a day … Real busy—that strange smile playing over his wet lips, how he shook Armand’s hand, the little squeeze he gave him, the way those three remaining fingers felt.

  I’ve had quite a day, he’d said. “A busy day,” Armand said out loud, his face grown flushed. The hot air blowing from the Crown Vic’s heaters annoyed him. The cat angered him. Who the fuck did Steingart think he was? And in Armand’s mind, the needle slid in, slowly, Elizabeth Wallace tipped back in the passenger seat of the blue Civic, eyes wide, a gun, perhaps, in his claw. He could hold a gun with three fingers; Armand had tried it.

  Then he imagined Lacy Johnson, or Wilma Perrin, or Kaylee Sims—in and in and in went the needles while they cried, while their eyes rolled back and their arms went limp. Sometimes the needles went in just once. Sometimes, just as the women recovered, the needle went in again.

  And what did they think as he closed the trunk over them, as they heard the car start up? As he drove them through the streets, paraded them around town, left them parked in the freezing cold where their bodies would not work, where their bodies failed them and all they could do was think, and all they could think was, Get me out of here!

  And without really knowing it, Armand turned left on Blue Ridge Boulevard, then pulled onto Route 50 East toward Steingart’s house.

  The cat shifted in the box.

  * * *

  “Your wife here?” Armand asked him

  “Of course not,” Steingart said. “I told you she’s at a conference.”

  “Was she at a conference when Lacy Johnson disappeared, three weeks ago Thursday?”

  Steingart appeared to think about it. He wetted his thick lips. “She was visiting her mother, now that I think about it,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  Steingart sipped his tea. He’d brought them both tea, though Armand hadn’t asked for it.

  “And when Wilma Perrin disappeared?”

  “Now when was that again?” Steingart asked.

  “December 7.”

  “Oh, dear. I don’t remember where she was.”

  “She was out that evening,” Armand said. “Parent-teacher conferences. I checked.”

  “Oh, yes,” Steingart said. He sipped his tea again. “Is there a problem with that? She’s not a suspect, is she?”

  “No, it’s just a funny coincidence.” Armand drummed his uneasy fingers on the arm of the sofa, two taps with his ring finger, two with his pinky. It took some concentration. “Why are you smiling?” he asked at last. “Is this funny to you?”

  “Of course not,” Steingart said, still smiling.

  “Is this a game? Is it some kind of game?”

  “It’s not a game.”

  Armand slid his hand into his jacket pocket, held his fist there to keep it from trembling, felt the cold steel of his service revolver. He’d taken it from the glove compartment of the Crown Vic before he knocked on Steingart’s door. He looked long and deep into the other man’s eyes. Steingart shifted modestly.

  “Where’s Elizabeth Wallace?”

  “Who?”

  “Elizabeth Wallace.”

  “Oh, dear,” Steingart said.

  “What did you do with her?”

  “Oh, dear.” He was still smiling.

  Outside, snow decorated the windowsills. It came down and down over the rooftops and the parked cars. It fell big and luminous in the streetlights’ glow. It fell big as aspirin tablets.

  Armand withdrew the gun.

  * * *

  “She’s in a tan Kia Sentra parked at the airport. Lot B, four or five spaces east of stop 7. She’s probably still alive.”

  Jackson was silent on the other end of the phone. “What the fuck?” he said at last, but by then Armand had hung up.

  It had been a pleasure getting the information out of Steingart. A real pleasure. And now he’d spent six hours driving in circles around the Plaza just thinking about it, watching the restaurants close, watching the bars close, watching as one by one the cars that lined the streets disappeared.

  It was a beautiful snow. A lovely, numbing snow that decorated the windshield for just a moment before the wipers brushed it away. Again and again. For hours.

  The cat meowed on the seat beside him. He still had to bring it to Lamar, but it was far too late now. Tomorrow. He’d do it tomorrow. Christmas Eve. It would be like a Christmas present.

  And what did it matter if he retired six days before he’d intended? What did it matter if they put him in a box, in a cage? He was already in a cage and it got smaller every day.

  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.

  MISSION HILLS CONFIDENTIAL

  BY GRACE SUH

  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 over
tones 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.”