Kansas City Noir

by Steve Paul

  Tom and Myra were trusted employees, but tonight Tom felt uneasy about the money. He walked Myra to her car around the corner and then returned to the tap room. Something was tugging at him. He stared at the rows of LPs above the turntable and instinctively reached for Clifford Brown. “Yesterdays.” Da da da dum, da da da dum, the bass and piano began, followed by strings finer than rain. Then the trumpet entered, dancing among the tables, swaying here and there, rising, falling, moving beyond the smoke-submerged tap room.

  Tom looked away from the photo of Milton and Count Basie at the sound of knocking on the heavy front door. Normally he’d never think of opening once the bar was closed, but his mind was running in several directions at once. Wouldn’t Milton use his key to get inside his own bar? Wouldn’t he use the back door anyway, where all the employees arrived and departed? Did he forget or lose his key? Or had some drunk simply heard the music and decided the bar was still open? He scratched the record lifting the needle from the turntable.

  “Yeah, what?” he said, opening the door a crack, but leaving the chain in place.

  A small man in shabby clothes stood on the other side. “Um—Milton Morris?”

  Tom held his breath, straining in the four a.m. darkness to see the little man’s features. “What about him?”

  The stranger stepped back and looked up and down Main Street. As the corner traffic lights changed, his profile glowed phosphorescent green. He was about to leave when Tom unchained the door and swung it open. “Come in.”

  The little man stepped inside the silent tap room.

  Tom closed the door and went behind the bar. “Sit down,” he said, pointing at a stool directly in front of him. “What’s your poison?”

  He sat at the end of the bar and looked around the room.

  “No, he’s not here,” Tom said. “I was hoping you’d tell me where he is.”

  “Took a powder, did he?”

  “Can’t really say,” Tom replied, annoyed by the question.

  “This joint hasn’t changed a bit … still the same dive after forty years. What are you charging for drinks these days, a buck, four bits?”

  “What, are you liquor control?”

  “If I was, you’d be in big trouble—reopening after hours, offering booze to a city official … This ain’t the old days, Tom, when your boss was chums with Pendergast. Things are different. Or didn’t you notice when you got back from ‘Nam?”

  “Get your ass out of here!”

  Milton Morris never kept a piece in the tap room because he didn’t need to. Nobody had ever tried to hold him up precisely because the old-time city boss Tom Pendergast and his people liked him. But that was then. Now Tom wished he had a .38 in his hand, anything, even a shillelagh. Though he didn’t dress the part, this guy talked like a hood. He slid off the stool and faced Tom.

  “Your boss better show up before too long, coz he’s gonna have to talk with us … or else, you know how it is, Tom, shit happens.”

  That, he remembered, was what every GI used to say, whether he bought it in Vietnam or made it home. Tom accepted that life was a bitch. It left you lying in a rotten mess. Shit happened, all right. You couldn’t stop it. Yet the little man’s threat reminded Tom that the shit bothered him still. He cared about the regulars he joked with every night, and the music of the tap room that blew through his empty soul, and Milton Morris himself, his only friend, a sort of father figure, though father was not a word Tom would have ever said. Nor would Milton, who never had a family, ever call him anything but Tom.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I know a lot more than that. I know you can’t stand this place. I know you’d like to get out. All the way out. If you’re smart, you’ll bail while you can, Tom, coz shit happens!”

  The little man put his hand in his pocket and deftly retrieved a cigarette, which he lit with a Zippo in one crisp motion with his other hand. Then he pushed the door open and left. As he passed the window, he looked like any bum Tom saw in Midtown—anonymous, ragtag, just another city dog padding along the street.

  Tom had worked for Milton Morris twelve years. He remembered the first time he entered the tap room on Main Street. It was 1962. He was still in high school, or rather, avoiding high school, when he found himself walking the spine of the city. At 32nd and Main, he paused in front of a window with blood-red Venetian blinds behind a Miller High Life neon sign and listened to a stream of shimmering notes leaking from within. He opened the door, pulling in the pavement dust.

  In the pitch black, his eyes were useless. Slowly he made out a burning red tip moving in an arc, and then a shaded lamp glowing dimly in a corner. Starting forward, his hands instinctively tried to grab hold of an invisible guide. The cement floor, with its funk of booze and tobacco, seemed to rise up under his feet. In this darkness then, as if a curtain was pulled back, he suddenly saw a man right in front of him, sitting on a wooden stool, his arm leaning on a narrow shelf attached to a pole, in his hand a glass of Cutty Sark, two rocks. A dark god made him. Or maybe he was the god of this underworld. His round face was pale as a cave-grown flower—but there was shrewdness in the look. He never got up from his stool, only looked at Tom until a mild smile came over his face, and Tom felt worthy to pass and enter this Hades, this haven.

  After weeks of coming to listen to Milton’s juke box of jazz records, Tom became friends with the man who had run saloons in Kansas City since Prohibition. Milton idolized the old mob days and the wide-open city, Tom learned, and he had no qualms about minors coming to his bar to hang out and drink. “If you’re hip enough to dig the music,” Milton told him, “you’re old enough to start a tab.”

  Tom paid his twenty-dollar tab the day he was drafted into the army. From boot camp he went straight to Vietnam, where shit happened every day—to everybody. Guys in his outfit disappeared while on patrol: KIA or captured. A fair number deserted, found their way to Scandinavia or settled down with a woman in some remote part of ‘Nam. He often wanted to disappear himself, but where was there to go? Either you came home in a body bag or the jungle swallowed you up. But Tom wished he’d had the balls to disappear. He remembered his friend Silky Jones who went to Sweden and wanted Tom to join him there. Instead, Tom returned to Kansas City when he was discharged, and reentered the life he had made in Milton’s Tap Room.

  Back home, he was wound tight all the time. He needed to calm himself, to get to the real echelon, so he bartended every afternoon and night, listening to Milton’s jokes, stories, and reminiscences. People of all sorts walked through the front door: musicians, mayors, professors, hustlers, rich men, secretaries, and lonely souls. They all came to dig the cool sounds. Every year he watched Milton run for governor on the same platform—legalized gambling; and every year he heard Milton’s message to countless bad check writers who drank for free in his tap room: “I ain’t mad at nobody.”

  Tom lay awake in his apartment, remembering his and Milton’s yesterdays. He didn’t want to remember anymore. It wasn’t that he wanted to erase his memories. He simply wanted to prevent them from contaminating the present. But the present wasn’t all that good. It was filled with some very uncomfortable things: Milton was gone, Tom hadn’t lived his life, and he needed to be mad at somebody or something. At five a.m. he was awakened by the phone.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Hello, Cheri.”

  Milton’s wife was twenty years younger than Milton, a Kansas girl with Turner’s syndrome. You couldn’t miss her in a crowd—if you could spot her in the first place. She was under five feet but looked like Mae West, with an hour-glass figure, platinum-blond hair, and deep blue eyes. Men fell immediately in love with her, including Milton Morris. But Cheri was no kewpie doll; she was loud, whiny, manic-depressive. Tom called her Bubbles, though never to Milton’s face.

  “Well, where is he? He’s not in his office and he didn’t come home and he’s got no excuse to go carousing!”

  That wasn’t
exactly true. When Milton hired Sana, a tall, athletic waitress from Finland, Tom told him he was going to ask her for a date. “She’s all wrong for you, Tom,” Milton had said. The next day Tom saw her come out of the boss’s office, pinning her hair back up and zipping her skirt. I’ll be goddamned, he thought. Could Milton’s disappearance be about another woman? What was he supposed to tell the man’s wife?

  “I don’t know where he is,” Tom said.

  “Whadd’ya mean you don’t know where he is? Did he vanish into thin air?”

  “I mean, one minute he was there and the next he wasn’t.”

  “You mean he took a powder.”

  “I don’t know.” Tom’s eyes were throbbing from lack of sleep.

  “Well, he wasn’t lifted up and taken to heaven, was he?”

  Tom began to wonder: was Milton hiding from the mob or from his wife? He’d better talk with us, the little guy had said. Did the mob want to take over Milton’s Tap Room? What would be the point of that? And Bubbles … Tom knew that in one of her manic moods she wasn’t likely to be doing housework. She had left Milton twice, ran off to California, though he talked her into coming back home both times.

  “Look, Cheri, maybe Basie’s in town, you know, an unplanned visit, and the two of them are getting together with Claude, Big Joe, or who knows who. He didn’t tell me anything.”

  “I’m worried as hell,” she said.

  Tom could hear voices in the background. He couldn’t tell if they were real or the garbled sounds from a TV or stereo. “Don’t worry,” he said. His sympathy sounded hollow to himself.

  “I don’t like being left alone.”

  “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong.”

  “Who said anything about wrong? I just wanna know where the hell he is, and why the hell he isn’t here!”

  “Would you like me to look for him?”

  “Call me the instant you know anything.”

  It was nearly Easter. There had been a torrent of rain for two nights, knocking all the blossoms of dogwood and catalpa to the sidewalk in splurges of color that soon turned black and globby. And in the storm sewers, the spring damage and leftover winter leaves lay together seeping like an undrinkable tea.

  Tom asked another bartender to cover for him at the tap room and spent two nights driving around town in search of his boss and friend. On the third night the sky was starless and the streetlights shrouded by a dark nimbus as Tom drove in circles. The instant he thought of rain his windshield began to boil with droplets. A sudden roar filled the air. He looked up to see the collision lights of a low-flying plane diving toward the downtown airport. The sound soon faded, but Tom remembered the thunderous explosion of helicopters and supply planes knocked out of the sky. He snapped on the wipers which squeaked like dying birds.

  Parking in front of the tap room at five a.m., he began canvasing the neighborhood. A hooker slowly passed him on her habitual toe-walk up and down Main Street. He could tell she did heroin and cocaine by the living skull look. Ten years before, she could have been Miss Teen America.

  The Warner Plaza apartments rose behind Milton’s Tap Room—tall, stiff shadows waiting in cold darkness. A light here and there showed the bedroom or bathroom of an insomniac or early riser. A ritual was beginning, Tom thought, or well under way. Someone was staring at himself in a mirror, shaving perhaps, or just staring, gazing, asking, Who are you? What do you want?

  He walked past the filling station, porno store, and camera shop, heading north on Main. It rained harder now. He crossed 31st Street. A few yards ahead, the door of the Eagle’s Nest tavern swung open. Out stepped the little man in shabby clothes. He turned, saw Tom in the predawn light, then began running north. Tom gave chase, as fast as his gimpy knees would let him, pursuing the surprisingly fleet-footed man to the crest of Main, then downhill, the rain folding as it ran over everything.

  At 29th Street he turned east, ran a short block before turning again. He led Tom through side streets in Union Hill, all the while glancing back over his shoulder, a smile flickering in his eyes. “Motherfucker!” Tom yelled with no effect, for his lungs were on the verge of collapse and the rain grew louder.

  Tom continued the pursuit. He was approaching a battle fury now. Despite the downpour, he could make out a blur disappearing into the wall of rain, even hear the man’s splashing feet as he continued running. He ran flat out, following. Where’s he leading me? he thought, trying frantically to visualize intersections, dead ends, and alleys. Then he realized he was heading south to East 31st Street, which moved below the thousand-foot TV transmitter tower—a black iron colossus visible for miles in the city. As Tom zigzagged between parked cars, he saw the little man fly across 31st, still looking back at Tom, his arms out, untouchable. He never saw the eastbound car.

  It came over the hill faster than it should. The sound of the impact was smothered like a cry by the surf. The car was already blocks away as Tom staggered up to where the little man lay in the street. The rainwater rolled over him with its debris of leaves, twigs, and gutter grit. A vision swam into Tom’s mind—that of a soldier lying in a rain-swollen tank track. “Shit happens,” he muttered. He looked up at the tower, whose flashing lights signaled threatening weather. Louder now, the rain seemed to be grinding earth and flesh together. Even in ‘Nam, he’d never felt so abandoned.

  * * *

  The police questioned Tom for two hours. During that time he told them everything he could remember between the disappearance of Milton Morris three nights ago and the death of the little man just before dawn. And then he offered more. Tom said that the bum had not only made threats at the tap room that night, but also claimed to have killed Milton Morris himself. Tom didn’t think that he was in fact dead, but he was going to help his friend by telling everyone that the owner of Milton’s Tap Room had been whacked. Tom saw that the cops were skeptical. The dead man was a zero—no prior record, no mug shot, no fingerprints, squat. Yet they were clearly eager to wrap up this case. Their plate was already full: the River Quay bombings of bars and restaurants that refused mob takeover; stiffs turning up in trash cans and parking lots; and a Southside serial rapist whose tally was approaching one hundred. They didn’t like the idea of a mob grab in Midtown, and Tom kept repeating that Milton’s Tap Room would make a great front. It had been operating in the neighborhood forever, the perfect spot for drops, fencing goods out the back door, or running a loan business. In the end, the cops were grateful that the nameless little man was out of the way. They thanked Tom for his misguided but heroic pursuit of a dangerous individual and sent him home.

  Word got around that Milton Morris was dead—murdered by the mob. His wife decided to close the tap room and move to California. The bartenders and regulars were shocked and confused. Losing both Milton and the tap room was a terrible blow. But soon they decided to throw a farewell party.

  For Tom, too, it was all wrapped up. If Milton was dead, well, what could Tom do about it? But if he was alive, Tom was pretty sure that Milton didn’t want anybody looking for him, and didn’t need anybody speculating about it. Dead was as good as anything Milton could be at this point. Tom would probably never know who the little guy he had pursued so feverishly really was. Maybe he was mobbed up. Or maybe he was just a grandiose amateur hoping someone would give him a few bucks to shut up and go away. He felt a little sorry for him now that he could look back on it all, but his curiosity was pretty much played out. Something else took its place.

  Mobsters would keep killing each other, he thought, so absorbed in their internecine battles. They didn’t see they were all out of glory days and were just marking time until their reign ended. On distant shores, other wars, equally futile, would grind to a similar end. And people would go on drinking in one bar or another, regardless of what happened to a tavern owner—or a bartender, for that matter. Oh, Tom would go to the memorial party that the regulars were organizing for Milton, and he’d listen to the stories he’d heard a thousand times, but it all
seemed beside the point now.

  They met on Easter Sunday because it was everyone’s day to escape—from work, family, God, themselves. Tom had seen these people alone or in small groups for twelve years, but it was different to see them all at once. They were good people, for the most part, but he couldn’t help wondering where the years had gone. They would recover from the loss of Milton Morris, but would they recover from the loss of Milton’s Tap Room? They would find another bar, all right—they could find a bar blindfolded—but the tap room had given them an identity.

  Myra approached Tom soon after the party began. “Know what?” she said.

  “No, what?”

  “A couple of nights ago, some guy swore he saw Milton buying cigars at Crown Liquors on the boulevard. He said he was asking for Havanas in a Spanish accent. Then last night another guy claimed he saw Milton walking a cat on a leash in Swope Park while humming ‘Melancholy Baby.’ It was a tuxedo cat, he said, fifty pounds if it was an ounce.”

  Maybe Milton did take a powder, Tom thought. Maybe he had a lot of things to escape from—his wife, his business, a bygone era. Maybe he realized he could start over and become a different person, not that relic which everybody thought they knew, including the mob.

  Tom poured drinks and played records and watched everyone having a ball and bawling their heads off over Milton and his tap room. In the middle of the celebration he slipped away. No one saw him leave, and no one remembered him disappearing. He left through the back door and walked down the alley to his car parked around the corner. It was filled with his belongings, which he’d already cleared out of his apartment. He hadn’t accumulated much over the years. With a tankful of gas and a glove box of road maps, he left Kansas City—for nowhere in particular.

  Driving through the sad streets he’d walked down every day, Tom could easily see the attractions of the past. Memory is a defense mechanism; it’s meant to protect you—from both the painful realities of the present and those of the past. Memory is selective. It’s also not easy to fact check. But it was more than that. The great virtue of the past was that it was gone and couldn’t hurt you anymore. Well, sometimes it could hurt you, Tom thought, reminded of the toll the past had taken on his own life. But that was the thing. Whether it presented itself to you as horrible or glorious, it was over. You had to go on living, and you had to do it now.