Kansas City Noir

by Steve Paul

  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. Som
etimes 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.

  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 cran
iosacral 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.