Free Kansas City Noir by Steve Paul Page A

mistrial, and a new trial announced, then the murder weapon was discovered behind her mother’s stove by new residents; and she said to her current Bub, a bartender at the Pussycat named Tony, of course: “I am magic, but I can’t be magic every day—better roll toward Mexico. Coming?”
    In Mexico City: Did Raul Sedillo Ortiz have a gold tooth that beckoned? A watch with diamond inlays that glittered until you felt a fever? Did the rude weasel ask you to pay for the drinks like you weren’t a lady? Tony fled north toward home, glad to get away whole, and all alone you went to the Casa Verde with your first Mexican Bub and … did he call you puta while you blew him?
    Convicted in Mexico, then disappeared from prison at Christmas of 1970, and there’s never been another photo of her above the fold for me to view and cherish. Killed by guards? Did the family of the dead man pay for her escape so they could execute her as they saw fit? Or did she make it to Honduras where by coincidence her lawyer owned seventeen thousand acres? That’s plenty of jungle.
    I feel her yet alive and no longer in Honduras. I feel her relocated to a brownstone overlooking Brush Creek, laughing to herself every morning as she exercises in Loose Park, a spry lady with a reshaped face and a loping gait. I feel … a wish, an old, lost wish, that she’d seen me once on the corner with my neck bared and my soul craving, understood me at a glance, had me for a snack, let me sleep hugging the pillow with her stink in the threads, then dispatched me about four a.m.; at the peak of my life, the existential summit, removed me from the herd, snuffed perfectly, before the horror unfolds. The fifty years of trudging bored flat toward an eternity of the dull; deader while standing than her victims laying underground, never feeling a timeless blade or seeing the goodbye flash from a barrel; never so alive as that one night you didn’t have when the wolf had at you in the old Muehlebach and murder was in the air with desire and despair and every vessel pumped inside your chest until you and the wild came together at that spot where the pale and dark worlds kiss and love is in the deed if not the word.

THE SOFTEST CRIME
    BY M ATTHEW E CK
    41st and Walnut
    for James Crumley
    I first met Alice four years ago in Kansas City at a conference for people affected by violent crimes. She was the daughter of a serial killer who had murdered forty-five women on the West Coast, and I was the son of a serial killer who had murdered fourteen people on the East Coast. We’d only gone to the conference because we’d both recently moved to Kansas City to get away from those who associated our names with the criminal way. It was our first and last attempt at one of those gatherings. There were more people there than you would imagine.
    We met at the bar in the lobby of the Hyatt on the last day of the conference and then spent the next two weeks in and out of each other’s beds. But we were a wreck together, and knew it. Our grief followed us kiss to kiss and bed to bed, so we agreed at last to leave each other alone.
    Then last year, the day after her father died, she called me and asked if I wanted to meet for drinks at The Cashew. She said there was a movie she wanted to see that was showing tomorrow at the art house near 20th and Grand. She asked if I’d like to see it with her before we went out for drinks. I said I would.
    The last big storm of the year moved through the city the night before we met. Two feet of snow fell in three hours. I watched it from the window of my apartment. I’d wanted to see her in all those intervening years that fell between our first parting. I watched the snowfall and tried to caress my emotions with a twelve-pack of beer. There was a point in the night where the electricity went out for about an hour. I lived in an apartment building at the corner of 41st and Walnut. From my window I could see that the lights were still on over the