Kansas City Noir

by Steve Paul

  James called 911 for Tony, and he soon went off in an ambulance.

  When Tony came back, his left arm was in a cast and he sported a black eye and broken nose. James was impressed. Tony was a big barroom brawler, and if he ended up with black eyes, the other guys usually looked half dead. Mr. Clark had looked just the same as always.

  After they’d been in the house a month and a half, Mr. Clark just disappeared. There was no sign of him for more than a month, then just as suddenly he was back. This became a pattern—several months at home, then vanished for a month or two.

  Mrs. Clark developed her own eccentricities. She stood out in her front yard for hours at a time, talking on her cell phone and pacing. When James worked in his garden, the sound of her shrill voice would follow him all over his yard, invading his quiet time with Celeste’s memory. When he went inside, he could still hear Mrs. Clark holding forth tirelessly. He admired the long life of her phone’s battery.

  One day Mrs. Clark’s obsessive outdoor phone calls took a new turn. She paced in a long bathrobe, which was tied so loosely at the waist that she exposed her long bare legs clear to the crotch of her red panties. It embarrassed and irritated James. Not satisfied with plaguing his peaceful garden time, she had to invade his privacy as well. She spent hours marching back and forth in that robe several days a week. James just tried to ignore her.

  When he told Scotty about it, Scotty decided she was mentally ill. “You need to get out of there, Dad. You have no idea what she might do.”

  “No, but it’s interesting to wonder about.” James said that just to work up his son.

  “Maybe her husband leaves when she’s dangerous, you know. He may know something you don’t, Dad.”

  “I think I’m more worried about Mr. Clark,” James joked. “For all I know, he might be a hit man off on assignment. He sure did major damage to Tony Boll.”

  “Good for him! That damned Tony’s needed someone to hand him his ears for years, Dad. You know that.”

  And so it went. His son and he agreed on very little.

  Eventually, Mrs. Clark designated herself as block captain. The block had never had one. Still, she began talking to the city on everyone else’s behalf. James just sighed at the arrogance.

  One day James received a letter from the city, a warning that cited “tall, noxious weeds.” His beautiful purple coneflowers? His prairie grasses?

  He called the number on the notice and tried to explain about his native plants. The city guy said a neighbor had complained, and the plants would have to be cut down. City ordinance. Any plant over twelve inches tall, other than trees, could be cited as too tall and noxious. James’s neighbors had the right to expect a well-maintained lawn to keep housing values high, he said. And if James didn’t cut down the “weeds” and put in grass, another neighbor complaint would lead to a court summons or arrest.

  James found this unbelievable. As if his neighborhood ever had high house values! He went to the library and confirmed the bad news. Same thing was happening all over the country. Cities were throwing law-abiding citizens in jail and bulldozing their yards. He hadn’t known he was part of the “native plant movement,” but he determined that wouldn’t do him much good.

  When he approached Mrs. Clark, she was strutting up and down her front yard in robe and purple panties, yakking on her phone. James waited until she hung up.

  “Did you call the city to complain about my garden?”

  She looked down at him with disdain. “That isn’t a garden. It’s a bunch of weeds.”

  “Mrs. Clark, this is a carefully tended garden of native plants. It’s much more environmentally sound than your monoculture lawn of bluegrass. I would be happy to educate you about the various plants in my garden. They are not weeds.”

  “They look like weeds, so they are. Appearance is what counts. Property values drop unless all the houses in a neighborhood have neat, well-maintained lawns.” She sounded as if she were quoting from a book. She turned her back and started talking on the phone again. She must have been dialing while they spoke.

  James sat in the garden, trying to find communion with Celeste’s spirit, but he was too upset, and it eluded him. He wiped sweat from his eyes and went inside to drink some iced tea and calm down. Maybe a little whiskey in the tea, even though he never drank before sundown.

  James wasn’t the only neighbor Mrs. Clark complained about. A man at the end of the block gave loud drunken parties. They often bothered James, but he tried to tolerate them since they only happened about once a month. Good neighbors know when to clam up. One night, the man had a party going, and a police car pulled up. The cops hammered on the door. The party host stepped out and argued with the cops. Over their shoulders he saw Mrs. Clark, who was now standing in the street, watching and talking on her phone. He flipped her the bird. People started leaving the party, and the man at the end of the block stood out on his lawn seeing them off.

  He yelled to Mrs. Clark, “Eat my dick, bitch!” and made thrusting motions with his pelvis. She shook her fist at him before turning and hurrying into her house.

  James felt a sense of satisfaction at seeing Mrs. Clark insulted. He would never do that, and he was ashamed of the feeling—for about a minute.

  That weekend, Scotty called, more agitated than usual. “Listen, Dad, you have to get out of there. Put the old house up for sale. I checked out that Clark guy who lives next door.”

  “Now why’d you do that, Scotty? You can’t invade someone’s privacy like that.” Just because Scotty worked for the government didn’t give him extra-legal rights, but he never seemed to understand that.

  “Well, I had a bad feeling about him, especially after you said that about him maybe being a hit man.”

  “Scott, I was joking! He’s probably a traveling salesman. You don’t even know his first name. You probably looked up the wrong guy.”

  “I had his address and got his full name from the deed.” His voice became more confident and forceful. “We run security checks on people all the time, Dad. And he’s not a traveling salesman. He’s black ops.”

  That sounded like something from one of those superhero comic books. “What on earth is black ops?”

  Scotty’s voice dropped into the condescending tone he always took on when he explained something about his job. “He works for one of the civilian security firms we employ to do dirty work for the military and the CIA. Assassinations, kidnappings, etc. This is a dangerous man, Dad.”

  “Wouldn’t someone like that be living in the DC area?”

  “Oh, Dad! We contract with dozens of companies all over this country that hire former military personnel. Usually with special forces training. Ex-military guys live all over the country, and they don’t have to move. They deploy from where they already live. They’re on contract, so why would they uproot their families? But the ones who fly out to do short assignments and then fly back home, they’re usually the real dangerous ones. Removal experts. You know,” he lowered his voice. “We need to get you out of there.”

  James could hear the fear behind the imperative in Scotty’s voice.

  “You put that house up for sale right away. I can help. We’ll get you into a condo out there, or you can come to Germany and live with Marla and me, but you need to get away from those people.”

  “I don’t want a condo, Scotty. All I want is my garden. It’s all I have left of your mother. I can’t give up our garden. I promised her I’d take care of it.”

  “Dad, Dad! Mom’s been dead for ten years. And she wouldn’t want you to stay in a dangerous place out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to her memory.”

  “I hope I never get to the point where I believe that loyalty to Celeste’s memory is misplaced. Maybe you can just forget your mother and all that she gave you, but I never will.”

  James was ashamed to remember he had been so upset that he hung up on Scotty. His own son.

  Two days later, he was out among the ditch lilies and hydrangeas,
once again ignoring Mrs. Clark’s piercing phone conversation and her state of undress, when Derrick Kappell, whose mother owned the house across the street from the Clarks, marched up to her. Derrick ran with the Bloods. Dressed in red—T-shirt, hat, socks, shoes, and hoodie with sleeves tied around his waist.

  James didn’t have any problems with Derrick. His mother was a sweet, long-suffering woman, and Derrick pretty much kept his gang activities away from the neighborhood. Twenty blocks further north, it would have been hell having a gangbanger living on the block. Those streets around there were up for grabs among the gangs, and the violence was constant. The death rate of young African American males living thirty to forty blocks north and east of Troost kept Kansas City among the top murder cities in the country.

  Derrick grabbed Mrs. Clark’s phone from her hand and tossed it into her backyard.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she cried.

  “What in the hell are you doing? Calling the city on me for that expired license plate! That’s going to cost me money. And what harm was it doing to you? What business of yours was it anyway?”

  Derrick was nineteen. He was six feet tall, so she actually topped him a little, but he was built like a linebacker, thick everywhere with hard muscle. He got right up in her face, and the skinny Mrs. Clark backed away, looking more than a little frightened.

  James was glad to see that. She needed to be frightened of Derrick and what he and his gang might do to her.

  “Your car was a nuisance. I’m the block captain. It’s my job to get rid of nuisances.” Mrs. Clark’s voice quavered.

  “You’re the fucking nuisance, bitch!” Derrick’s shout moved her further back into her yard.

  James shook his head at the woman’s stupidity, bringing the city’s attention onto Derrick in his home. He wondered what he’d do if Derrick started to beat her up. He didn’t like the woman or her husband, but he decided in all decency he’d have to try to intervene. That would be dangerous before and after. James didn’t like thinking about it. So he tried to fortify himself and steady his nerves.

  “Look at you, fucking ho. I ought to call the cops on you for flashing your skinny cunt around the way you do. Right across from my mama’s house. You advertising? You want me to send some brothers your way? Maybe some high rollers? I bet you give good head with that big mouth.”

  James had never seen Mrs. Clark speechless, but her mouth—it was big—sagged open before Derrick’s verbal attack.

  “I ought to kick the living shit out of you, bitch!”

  James tensed his muscles, not that an old man like him would be much of a deterrent to a pit bull like Derrick, but he could try to slow him down or at least get to Mrs. Clark’s cell phone in the backyard and call 911 for help.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she cried. “But you know the city’s going to come down on you if you don’t follow the law, so why don’t you just do it?”

  “The city ain’t going to come down on me unless some bigmouthed bitch calls them. You get one warning, ho! Call the city on me again, and you will bleed! You understand?” Derrick roared on the word bleed, and James thought Mrs. Clark’s gangly legs might collapse at the sound. She swayed a little but remained standing, and James had to admire her stubborn backbone, if not her lack of sense.

  “I understand. But you know the city’s going to be watching this area. They may come ticket you, and it won’t be because I called.”

  Derrick’s voice grew very low, yet it sounded so harsh that James wanted to close his eyes. “If the city or the cops come around my house again, I will know it was you that turned me in, bitch, and I will come get you. So you’d better pray they never show up. You understand that?”

  She nodded dumbly with eyes that had doubled in size. Derrick stomped back across the street, and James felt a little faint with the relief of not having to face the gangbanger’s violence after all. Mrs. Clark hurried back into her house and didn’t come out again the rest of the day.

  Still, James thought, the neighborhood was not so bad. Derrick’s mom had moved her family out here to get away from the gang violence. She brought it with her in the form of Derrick, of course, but he went up further north with his crew much of the time. The gang tags at the stone wall by the liquor store on the corner warned casual troublemakers that this block was Bloods territory. Now, that wouldn’t help if another gang decided to move south and invade, but it kept the day-to-day criminals and punks that hung around the places Scotty worried about on Troost from coming down the street looking for trouble.

  Not that James was going to tell Scotty he was relatively safe because he was under gang protection. He could imagine how Scotty would take that.

  * * *

  Weeks went by quietly. The heat grew worse and worse. Scotty called on weekends, and they danced around each other, unable to get back to their old relationship and unsure what relationship they had now. Another little victory for Mrs. Clark, James supposed. She had returned to her front-yard athletic phone conversations. She was always fully clothed, however, so Derrick had made some kind of impact.

  On a heat-danger Friday, James took the mail from the mailman and sat on a weeding bench to look through it. He found a summons to housing court. He could pay a $210 fine, or he could show up in court to try to fight the accusation of a nuisance yard. He could even go to jail.

  James sat with the paper in his lap for a long time. He was seventy years old. He could call the TV stations and let the city arrest him on camera. How would that look?

  Mrs. Clark’s voice snagged his attention. On her damned cell phone. James turned toward the sound and found his fist clenching. He wanted to do just what Derrick Kappell had done. He wanted to march up to her and bellow and make her shake with fear. But how likely was that?

  James read through the summons again, including all the fine print. That was where he found out they were going to bring in contractors to mow down his garden and charge him large fees to pay for it. It was like telling him they were going to execute him and bill him in advance for the headsman. Celeste’s garden. Clear-cut to the ground. His hands shook, and the paper rattled.

  He sat in the sun and heat for hours, full of rage and mourning, until he was light-headed. Until a plan formed in his mind.

  He took his car from the garage. Scotty wanted James to dump the old Taurus but it had everything he needed. He couldn’t turn to Scotty. No, James had to follow his own plan.

  He drove around trying to find a working pay phone, somewhere beyond the neighborhood. Finally, he spotted a fairly secluded phone over in Kansas, near a white folks’ tennis club.

  He put in his money and dialed 311, the city call center. Holding his handkerchief over the mouthpiece of the phone and making his voice as high-pitched and feminine as he could, James made an anonymous complaint about Derrick Kappell’s unlicensed car and about the unrepaired wooden steps to Derrick’s screened porch.

  He hung up quickly, feeling sick to his stomach. When he got home, he was so dizzy from the heat that he went inside and slept restlessly until the next morning.

  The dangerous heat wave stuck around. James only ventured into the garden in the early morning and late evening. Even Mrs. Clark reserved her outdoor phone promenades for those cooler hours. The weekend came and went.

  Late Wednesday afternoon, James heard shouting and arguing coming from Derrick’s house. He saw Derrick leave when some of his gang picked him up. James decided to stay inside, but he couldn’t help keeping watch at the window.

  At about eight o’clock that evening, a strange car with a rumbling muffler and no plates raced down the street. Someone within fired automatic rounds at Mrs. Clark in her front yard. The Clarks’ front windows exploded, their door ripped by bullets. And Mrs. Clark lay bleeding as the car zoomed off. Mrs. Boll ran from her house, screaming at her husband to call an ambulance.

  James went to bed, feeling more than a little ill. All he wanted was the blessed blankness of sleep, but he
thrashed around, replaying the scene over and over.

  The next day, a police detective came to the door. He said he’d heard James was always out in the yard and would have a good description of the car. James told the detective he hadn’t gone out because he was sick from the heat. The guy looked at him pityingly and said James didn’t have to be afraid, that the police could protect him. James knew the cop was seeing a helpless old African American man frightened to death of his bad neighborhood. James kept repeating that he had been sick and had stayed indoors.

  He really was sick. For days, he could hardly get out of bed. On the weekend when Scotty called, James told him he would sell the house since the city was going to destroy the garden anyway. Scotty was happy to hear his decision and told James to go to the doctor.

  On Monday, the temperature reached above one hundred again, breaking a ninety-year-old record. James didn’t have the strength or heart to go out in the garden, so he sat in the house until the phone rang.

  “You were responsible for the death of Jarene Clark,” the voice on the phone said.

  James could see Clark that first day as he looked up into the man’s cold blue eyes and tried to shake his hand.

  Jarene? It didn’t seem to fit that energetic, irritating woman.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with her death,” James said. “She angered some rough men in the neighborhood. I imagine it was one of them.” James was pleased that his voice didn’t waver.

  “I know who killed her,” said Mr. Clark. “He’s already been taken care of. But you were responsible. You set it in motion.” He paused a second. “Nice plan.”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” James heard his own voice flinch, but thought that could be put down to the natural fear of an old man.