Kansas City Noir (21 page)

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.

* * *

Author’s note: This story is based on local history; however, it has been fictionalized and all persons appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

LAST NIGHT AT THE RIALTO

BY
M
ITCH
B
RIAN

The Celluloid Cit
y

Marty had sold the popcorn machine last week on the condition that it would stay in the theater until closing night. Marty was like that. Always making deals with conditions. I’ll do this but you have to do that. It probably made him feel powerful. Claire was cleaning the machine a final time, wiping off the stainless steel bottom of the popcorn bin so it shined and reflected the shape of her face like a fun house mirror, when Rance came out of the projection booth and crossed the lobby to the snack bar.

She turned and smiled: “All done.”

Rance looked at the machine. She’d done a good job all right. Better than Marty deserved. Tomorrow whoever Marty sold it to would pick it up, or send somebody and that would be that. Rance bet Marty already had the money in his pocket. Marty could feel like he stiffed the guy for a week. Marty was like that. Rance looked back at Claire, taking in her short black hair, wide mouth, and the tiny stud in her left nostril.

She hooked a thumb back at a box beside the soda fountain. “Candy’s all in the box. You want me to unhook the fountain?”

“Naw, I’ll get it,” Rance said. “I’ll lock up behind you.”

Rance watched her walk back to the cash register, grab her backpack, and sling it over her shoulder. She walked heavy for somebody so light and thin. She’d be elegant someday but she’s still a teenager, Rance thought, even if she is twenty-one. He was twice her age and then some. She could be his daughter but he didn’t like to think about her that way.

He walked with her to the glass doors as he had done hundreds of time before, crossing the carpet with its swirling red-and-gold patterns and angular masks of comedy and tragedy. He stopped just short of the door and she seemed to follow his lead, not breezing out as she usually did. Rance felt a little shiver, like they were of one mind. She turned to him and he said, “You want anything?”

She met his eyes, uncertain. He couldn’t hold her stare for long and as always when this happened, he shifted his gaze to the stud in her nose. It was hard to look at her when she was looking at him. He liked it better when she didn’t know he was watching.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He knew he’d caught her off guard. It was awkward. “A souvenir. Something to remember the place by.”

“What, like a light fixture?” She managed a half-laugh, like she was trying to ease the tension.

He didn’t mean for this to be tense. Maybe he’d been too abrupt when he stopped at the door like that. “I just thought you might have wanted something.”

She looked past him, scanning the lobby. He watched her and wondered if her skin was as soft as he imagined. He saw her blink and could make out every eyelash. If this was a movie it would be a close-up. A luminous, Technicolor, Hollywood close-up as she gazed across the lobby of gold and red.

She looked back at him. And caught him staring. They both knew. She gave that shrug of hers and leaned toward the door.

“I’ll remember it fine. See you round, Rance.” And she was out the glass doors.

He turned the lock and heard it click. He watched her unlock her bike from the rack under the neon glow of the marquee. He didn’t want to watch her ride off into the night. He shifted his weight and was instantly aware of his own reflection staring back at him: short cropped blond hair concealing gray strands, silver frames of his glasses on his pudgy face, faded Hawaiian shirt. He turned his back on her and headed across the lobby to the double doors leading into the auditorium. Just one more thing to do tonight. One last thing before closing forever.

Rance walked down the sloping aisle of the auditorium, headed for the red velvet curtains covering the fifty-foot screen. He’d opened and closed those drapes thousands of times. He once tried to do the math and figure out how many movies he’d projected here over the past twenty-two years. And then there was another ten before that at the old Fine Arts across the state line in Kansas. And the year before that he’d worked a few months at the Brookside Theatre before it closed. A year later, when it was set to be turned into a nightclub, somebody went in during the middle of the night and burned the place down. Rance hated the idea of it burning, but even worse was the thought of disco music rattling those sweet old columns along the walls and the balcony gutted and turned into a lounge with fake leather sofas and shag carpet. Sometimes the mob did right by this town. Torching the Brookside before it could be spoiled was okay by him. And anyway, this place beat the shit out of either of those.

The Rialto had been built in 1949 and wasn’t as flashy as the Boller Brothers theaters that dominated the Midwest in the ‘20s and ‘30s. It had no balcony, no atmospheric ceiling with fake stars twinkling down, no mock Spanish colonnades. Instead it had clean, modern lines. The walls ascended forty feet and then seemed to ring the auditorium, circling over the top of the screen with a thin line of satin aluminum. Above it, the ceiling curved gently, enhanced by the white plaster, creating the illusion of being open and infinite. It reminded Rance of a planetarium dome before it filled with constellations. The illusion would be perfect except for the water stains that marred the ceiling from a leaky roof. Insurance had fixed the roof, but wouldn’t pay to replaster and paint, and Marty refused to go to the hip for it. “People come to look at the screen, not the ceiling,” he’d say. But the truth was that he planned to sell the Rialto as soon as he could find a buyer and wasn’t about to sink another dime into it.

The Rialto had been dying a slow death for years. The audience for independent movies was shrinking and the big theater chains were booking those few remaining offbeat, specialty, and world-cinema titles that used to be the bread and butter of art houses like the Rialto. These days a single-screen theater, especially one in Midtown, simply couldn’t compete. Marty had hoped to find somebody who wanted to take it over, but in the end a real estate developer who liked the location had made a good offer and Marty had found his buyer. Now he was going make a big chunk of change. And it wasn’t just the theater he planned to unload.

Rance slowed as he reached the curtain, stepped behind the plush drapes, and stared at the canisters lined up in front of him. These were Marty’s prints. Cans of thirty-five-millimeter films collected here in the dusty space behind the screen. There were several crime films, an art house domestic drama, a hospital comedy, a jazz flick, even a sort of western set during the border war. All were in mint condition and all had been shot here in Kansas City. This was Marty’s personal memorial to his hometown. If a movie had footage shot anywhere in the five counties that made up the two-state metro area, Marty had to have it. Movies set in Kansas City but shot somewhere else, like that piece of shit Burt Reynolds–Clint Eastwood abortion, didn’t make the cut. Marty was adamant about what was and wasn’t worthy of his stash.