Kansas City Noir (23 page)
It took two matches to get it all going. It would have been nice if one had done the trick. The first match ignited the soaked carpet and shot along from the booth just like it happened in the movies, then branched into two fiery paths: one into the auditorium and the other to the lobby. The fire climbed up the front of the concession counter and engulfed the popcorn machine. Rance moved back into the booth and looked out the small glass window. He watched the line of flame reach the gas-soaked curtain and fan upward over the velvet. The smell of smoke hit his nostrils and he had to fight the urge to just leave the booth, toss another match in, and run away. He had to think about Marty’s face and imagine his expression when he got the news that the Rialto was all burned away and his precious films with it.
Then Rance smiled, thinking about Ace and how he’d brought those empty film cans along, just as Rance had instructed. And how he and Rance had loaded Marty’s prints into those cans and Ace had taken them away. Marty had hated Ace ever since some coke deal had gone south back in the ‘80s and Marty wound up empty-handed. He’d held that grudge forever. He was like that.
Rance knew Ace would take good care of Marty’s collection. That was comforting. It inspired Rance and he tossed the second match into the mound of film around him. He watched it catch fire and saw the flames consume the walls of the booth. Too bad it wasn’t nitrate. This place would really go, then. But it caught fast and the heat rose and hit Rance’s face and he thought of humid summers and the welcome cold blast of movie theater AC. Rance clutched the old detective’s pistol and without looking closed his eyes and shoved the barrel into his mouth. Then he pulled the trigger and was sure he heard the MGM lion’s roar.
BY
N
ADIA
P
FLAUM
18th and Vine
On evenings like this, when a thousand pounds of worry pressed down on Charlie Price’s shoulders, his gray PT Cruiser seemed to guide itself home. Charlie nearly blinked in surprise when the car nosed into his own driveway, in the empty spot next to the one reserved for his wife’s waxed Chrysler 300.
Charlie’s anxiety eased when he realized that his wife wouldn’t be home for another few hours. It was the first Monday of the month. She’d be at the Black Chamber of Commerce board meeting, milking every ounce of her status as the Spouse of an Important Entrepreneur.
What the board had to gain from her membership, or his, for that matter, was clear as molasses to Charlie. Price’s KC Barbecue had a reputation built on sixty-plus years as a local institution, he’d pointed out when his wife dropped the chamber’s invitation on his lap.
“It’s important to be civicly involved,” his wife had said. She used solemn tones, the same ones she’d employed to cajole him into joining St. Matthew’s, in the pews of which sat a veritable who’s who of prominent black Kansas City.
It wasn’t enough simply to attend on Sundays. Never mind that Charlie and his wife had been devotedly secular since their courthouse wedding some twenty-three years prior. No, they had to drop a fortune at Neiman Marcus to cobble together some version of Sunday best, as though the walk from the parking lot’s scorching black asphalt to St. Matthew’s front doors was a red-carpet, Oscar-night promenade.
Nor was it enough to tithe with a couple bucks from one’s billfold. Charlie’s wife wanted him to make a big production of unfurling a thick white envelope from his inner coat pocket, passing it to her to place in the wicker basket that came poking into their pew on a wooden stick.
It was all about appearances with her, Charlie grumbled to himself as he shoved open the front door and confronted the stale air of their South Kansas City home. He recalled how his wife had come home from her first Black Chamber board meeting in tears because someone—the wife of some uppity city council so-and-so—had commented on her pearls. “Are they real?” the woman had asked sweetly, and his wife had lied that they were, even though anyone with eyes could plainly see the seam in each plastic bead.
But in recent months, even Charlie had to admit—not aloud, but quietly, to himself—that there was something to be said about maintaining appearances.
When Charles Price Sr., the founder of Price’s, died unexpectedly six months ago, Charlie inherited more than his dad’s business. Price’s was a symbol of Kansas City.
Presidential candidates who came stumping had to be diplomatic in local culinary quarters. They’d run the KC barbecue circuit, sampling the pulled pork and beef-on-bun at Price’s and the other historic joints in town. And if asked which meal had been his or her favorite, the candidates invariably declared it a tie.
But a restaurant owner could only ride so far on the dollars of tourists on their obligatory barbecue tours. A flashy, city-subsidized new development had plopped itself squarely in the middle of downtown, and its chain restaurants, with their nationally identical menus, sucked up the trade show–goers and conventioneers with the lust of a fat kid draining the last drops of milk shake from a straw. This new downtown entertainment zone had been constructed posthaste, thanks to a thirty-year tax-abatement deal inked by its out-of-town developers and the city.
And the Black Chamber didn’t say a peep. So much for being civicly involved.
For the better part of a century, the
Open
sign at Price’s glowed in the window of a low-slung redbrick building on the easternmost section of Kansas City’s historic 18th and Vine district. All the action along this strip—if one could call it action after a couple decades of municipal neglect and indifference—happened blocks west, near the Gem Theater, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and the American Jazz Museum. Charlie Price took up the habit of walking the few blocks each morning to the sidewalk where the tour buses stopped and setting up a sandwich board that read,
Don’t forget your taste of original KC BBQ at Price’s, two blocks east!
Charlie had to admit that location was the least of his concerns.
While the menu hadn’t changed in over fifty years, Price’s prices certainly had. They were driven up by the cost of damn near everything, from napkins to soy sauce, sugar to dishwashing detergent. Luckily, Charlie’s dad had been wise to purchase land thirty minutes from town, where he placed his lifelong best friend and business partner, Sam, in charge of a small parcel of property to raise hogs and run hickory and cherry logs through a massive wood chipper. Raising one’s own pork and buying wood wholesale kept costs down, Charlie knew.
Still, within six months after taking on his late father’s operation, Charlie found himself scrimping on some of his signature perks. Gone were the boys in blue Price’s jackets who parked cars for patrons who wanted complimentary door-to-door service. An extra cup of cole slaw cost a dollar today, as did refills of red cream soda. The regulars complained, as regulars do. Charlie’s dad, Charles Price Sr., had always stressed the importance of rewarding customer loyalty, but whenever Charlie drove past the packed parking lots of chain burger joints on his way to work, he wondered whether loyalty had gone the way of the five-dollar lunch.
Price’s wasn’t the only barbecue joint that was struggling. Charlie took some solace in the fact that each of the local Big Three—the three oldest, owner-operated barbecue joints in the city—seemed to suffer equally. It was some comfort, but not much. In their rare get-together, the owners of the Big Three groused about the fickleness of the restaurant industry. Legendary names help, though names sure don’t pay the bills.
But the ax had really come down on Charlie a week ago.
That day ended like any other. Charlie walked the perimeter of the restaurant’s property, picking up trash and telling loiterers to move along, lobbing his usual threats at the kids who hung out near the bus stop. Charlie took issue with Generation Rap. He didn’t like their bomp-bomp-bomp bass, their asses hanging out of sagging pants, the long white T-shirts that made grown men look like toddlers. Charlie assumed they all sold drugs, and in that case, he figured, they ought to be buying more barbecue.
Charlie came back inside as the manager was just switching off the neon signs. He was settling down in the restaurant’s office with a fluttering pile of the day’s receipts when a man in a red tracksuit and a five-o’clock shadow appeared in the doorway.
C.J. Portello was his name. Said he had been a friend of Charlie’s dead father.
“Who wasn’t?” Charlie said, not looking up from his desk. “We’re closed.”
The man in the tracksuit cleared his throat. “We waited six months, out of respect.” He stepped into the office to slide a manila folder beneath Charlie’s nose. “But now that you’ve gotten the hang of things, it’s time you learned how Charles Sr. really did business.”
Charlie picked up the folder by one corner and flipped it open warily.
“Your dad didn’t have enough money for a sack of Price’s fries when he met my father, James Portello,” C.J. said. “All the seed money he used to start this business? That was a loan from us. And for over six decades, that loan has accrued a lot of interest.”
Charlie recognized his father’s elegant signature on the bottom of a yellowing document in the folder. The document had a lot of fine print, and a lot of zeros.
He stood from his desk abruptly, and just as quickly, the small office filled with the presence of the widest man Charlie had ever seen. The barrel chest came toward him, and towered over him as C.J.‘s red tracksuit faded from view. A meaty hand suddenly shot forward and clenched Charlie between the legs, squeezing. The zeros on the printed page swam before Charlie’s eyes.
From somewhere that sounded far away, Charlie heard C.J.‘s voice: “Now you know the Portello family recipe for pulled pork. Fall behind on your daddy’s payments, and we’ll repossess what’s ours.”
After the laugher faded out into the parking lot and he was sure that the visitors were gone, and he no longer felt like throwing up, Charlie got to his feet, stumbled to his car, and drove straight to the farm, and Sam.
Sam was, for all intents and purposes, Charlie’s uncle, though his relation to Charles Sr. wasn’t through blood. The men knew each other from “the block,” 38th and Forest, and that’s where they had reunited after each was medically discharged from Vietnam, six months apart.
When they went into the barbecue business together, Charles Sr. wore the suits and did the glad-handing and ribbon-cutting. Meanwhile, Sam wore muddy overalls, kept the hogs fed, and when it was time, slaughtered them.
Charlie parked his PT Cruiser in the grass and followed an extension cord that snaked from Sam’s bare-bones house and across the weed-specked dirt, out to the woodshed, which sat beside the gate to the hog pen. At the terminus of the cord, Charlie found an oscillating fan, a laptop, and Sam, his face bathed in the screen’s green glow.
Charlie thrust the folder from Portello between Sam’s nose and the laptop screen.
“What do you know about this?” Charlie demanded.
Sam took the folder and opened it, leaning back slowly on the stepladder he was using as a stool. He squinted. His white-flecked eyebrows raised. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered.
Charlie leaned against a wall full of tools and rubbed his forehead with both hands.
“Looks like your father was paying the Portellos $1,000 a month toward their $250,000 investment,” Sam went on. “But at the rate of interest these greaseballs set, he never made a dent.”
Charlie paced back and forth in the shed. “Nobody can know about this,” he said. “I can barely make payroll. I can’t pay these guys. They’re going to kill me and take Price’s and turn it into a spaghetti factory.”
In the months since Charles Sr. died, Charlie had leaned on Sam heavily. The older man always seemed to have the answers. But tonight was different.
“I suppose you’ll have to find a way,” is all Sam said.
The following night, after another long day slinging meat—or, more accurately, watching his employees sling meat—Charlie came home again to a dark house. Charlie’s wife, he knew, was at her weekly bible study. He emptied the bulging pockets of his work pants—the janitor-sized key ring, his cell phone, a couple packets of wet naps—and plunked it all on the dining room table before settling on the couch and turning on the TV.
On the local news, a reporter stood in front of a ramshackle East Kansas City house whose front lawn was crisscrossed with yellow tape. Another homicide. Charlie sighed. Was it really necessary for the reporters to broadcast live in front of the scene, as aunties and cousins wailed in the background? Promising updates, the broadcast mercifully segued into commercials.
That’s when Charlie saw it.
“
THIS SATURDAY NIGHT
,” the commercial boomed, as a relentless bassline made Charlie scramble for the volume button, “Kansas City’s own MAJOR PLAYER RECORDS drops the album of the summer on you, from their HOTTEST RECORDING ARTIST YET.”
All at once, the screen was overtaken by a pair of lips. A finger came into the frame, hushing the lips. On the finger was a gold ring. And on the ring, nine flawless diamonds formed a glittering
P
.
“Y’all ain’t seen nothin’ till you see this,” drawled the owner of that ring, the man himself, Major Player.
As the commercial blared the whats and wheres of the concert, Charlie grabbed a pen from an end table and scribbled a note to himself on the back of a packet of wet naps.
* * *
The next day at the restaurant, Charlie made his way through the kitchen’s swinging aluminum doors. He found Marcus, the twenty-five-year-old busboy, filling up a soapy pail of mop water by the back door.
“What’s the deal with Major Player?” Charlie asked the kid.
Marcus looked up. “Huh?”
Charlie paused, suddenly self-conscious.
Marcus had been one of his father’s last hires before he died. Charles Price Sr. had marveled aloud over the young man’s promise and potential. Charlie didn’t understand how anyone, at twenty-five, could be satisfied with being a busboy. Guess some guys just didn’t aspire to much.
