Twin Cities Noir

“Dallying with a bored rich woman? How’s that going to change your luck?”

Kid peered up from watching the fish fry. “I got inside today, looked the place over. They got all this expensive crap lying around.”

“And you’re what, just going to waltz in and help yourself?”

His looked turned coy. “She let me inside today when her old man took off to get a bunch of bushes from the nursery. Asked if I wanted some cold lemonade. Starts talking kind of general, you know. Where I’m from, do I got family, that kind of thing. Then, get this, she tells me her husband’s not a man for her. No lighting in the rod, you know? I tell her that’s a damn shame, all her good looks going to waste. She says, ‘You think I’m pretty?’ I tell her she’s the prettiest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen. Then you know what, Professor? She invites me back tonight. Her old man’s going out of town and she’s all alone. Doesn’t want to be lonely. Know what I’m saying? When it’s dark, I’m heading over.”

“You’re spending the night?”

“Not the whole night. She don’t want me around in the morning for the neighbors to see sneaking off.”

“You sure you’re not on something?”

“Proof, Professor,” he said with a sly grin. “I got proof.”

From his pants pocket, he took a small ball of black fabric. He uncrumpled it and held it toward me with both hands, as if he were holding diamonds. “Her panties.”

Thong panties, barely enough material to cover a canary.

“She gave you those?”

“Reached up under her skirt and slipped ’em off where she stood. Said they’d tide me over until tonight.”

He went to his things and rolled the panties in his blanket.

“Hungry?” I asked.

“Naw. I’m going to the Y, slip inside and wash up. I want to smell good tonight. Don’t wait up for me, Dad,” he said with a grin, and he walked off whistling.

He didn’t come back that night. I figured he’d got what he wanted from the rich man’s wife and the rich man’s house and I’d seen the last of him. What did I care? People come into your life and they go. You can’t cry over them all.

So why did I feel so low the next day? All I wanted was to get drunk. Finally, I headed to the plasma center on University, let them siphon off a little precious bodily fluid, and I walked out with cash. I headed to the Gopher Bar for an afternoon of scintillating conversation with whoever happened to be around. It was a place where Kid and I had sometimes hung out together, and I hoped he might be there.

Laci was tending bar. A hard, unpretty woman with a quick mind. She sized me up as I sat on a stool. “Starting the wake, Professor?”

“You lost me,” I said.

She threw a bar towel over her shoulder and came my way. “I figured you were planning to tip a few to the memory of your buddy. Not that a piece of crap like him deserves it.”

“Kid? Piece of crap? What are you talking about?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

She turned, took a bottle of Old Grandad down from the shelf, and poured me a couple of fingers worth. “This one’s on the house.”

Then she told me about Kid. It was all over the news.

The night before, he’d been shot dead in the rich man’s house, but not before he beat the guy’s wife to death with a crowbar.

“Funny.” She shook her head. “I never figured him to be the violent kind. But anybody beats a woman to death deserves what he gets. Sorry, Professor, that’s how I see it.”

I swallowed the whiskey she’d poured, but instead of sticking around to get drunk, I walked back to the river.

That night I didn’t bother putting together a fire, just sat on the riverbank below the High Bridge, listening to the sound of occasional traffic far above, thinking about Kid. At one point I pulled out my notepad, intending to write. I don’t know what. Maybe a eulogy, something to mark his passing. Instead, I picked up a stick and scratched in the sand. A few minutes later a barge chugged past and the wake washed away what I’d written. I ended up crying a little, which almost never happens when I’m sober.

Two years ago I had a wife, a good job as a reporter with the Star Tribune,a house, a car. Then Deborah left me. She said it was the drinking, but it was me. I was never reliable. The drinking only made it worse. Not long after that I lost my job because I was happier sitting at the bar than at my desk trying to meet deadline. Everything pretty much went downhill from there. Somebody tells you they drink because they’re a failure, it ain’t so. They’re a failure because they drink. And they drink because it’s so damn hard not to. But as long as they have a bottle that isn’t empty, they never feel far from being happy.

That’s me anyway.

Near dawn, I stood up from the long night of grieving for Kid. I was hungry. I walked the empty streets of downtown St. Paul to Mickey’s Diner, got there just as the sun was coming up, ordered eggs, cakes, coffee. I picked up a morning paper lying on the stool next to me. Kid and what he’d done was still front-page news.

He had a name. Lester Greene. He had a record, spent time in St. Cloud for boosting cars. He had no permanent address. He was a bum. And he’d become a murderer.

The woman he’d killed was Christine Coyer, president and CEO of Coyer Cosmetics. Deborah used to ask for Coyer stuff every Christmas. All I remember about it was that it was expensive. According to the paper, she’d just returned from visiting family in New York City. Her husband had picked her up at the airport, brought her home, and while he parked the car in the garage, she’d gone into the house ahead of him. Apparently, she surprised Kid, who’d broken in with a crowbar, which he proceeded to use to crack her skull. He attacked her husband too, but the guy made it upstairs where he kept a pistol for protection. Kid followed and the rich man put four bullets into him in the bedroom. He was dead when the cops arrived. The husband knew the assailant. A bum on whom he had taken pity. A mistake he now regretted.

The story was continued on page 5A with pictures. I could tell already the whole thing smelled, but when I turned to the photos I nearly fell off my stool. There was the dead woman. She was fiftyish, nicely coiffed, but not with long black hair that brushed the top of her ass. She was a little on the chubby side, matronly even. Not at all the kind of figure a pair of thong panties would enhance.

If the article was correct, she’d been in the Big Apple when Kid had been given that delicate little sexual appetizer. So, if Christine Coyer didn’t give it to him, who did?

During my college days, my clothing came from the Salvation Army. I shopped there in protest against consumerism and conformity. I shop there now out of necessity. For ten bucks I picked up a passable gray suit, a nearly white shirt, and a tie that didn’t make me puke. I washed up in the men’s room of a Super America on 7th, changed into the suit, and hoofed it to the address on Summit Avenue given in the newspaper story.

Like a big park, Kid had described the place. His perspective was limited. It was the fucking Tuileries Gardens, a huge expanse of tended flower beds and sculpted shrubbery with a chateau dead center. The cosmetics business had been very good to Ms. Coyer. And to her husband, no doubt. So good, in fact, one had to wonder why a man would do any of the dirty landscape work himself. Or hire someone like Kid to help.

I knocked on the door, a cold call, something I’d often done in my days as a journalist. I had my notepad and pen out, in case I needed to pretend to be a reporter.

A woman answered. “Yes?”

I told her I was looking for Christine Coyer’s husband.

“He’s not here,” she informed me. “Do you have an appointment?”

No, just hoping to get lucky, I told her.

“Would you like to leave a message?”

I didn’t. I thanked her and left.

I headed back to the river thinking the woman’s accent was French, but not heavily so. Quebec, maybe. Her black hair when let down would easily reach her ass. And that body in thong panties would be enough to drive any