bad, we all want to know how in the world something like that happened.”
“That’s what newspapers and cable TV are for.”
“Man, you are a tough nut. I’m just an old man looking for a little excitement in my old neighborhood, and you’re acting like I need a top-secret clearance to find out how a man died.”
“You need a better reason than that.”
He pursed his lips, nodding, looking past me, down the street and back, taking a breath and letting it out with his slow confession.
“My family lived down the street in that house,” he said, pointing to another down-at-the-heel mansion two doors away. “It was a boardinghouse. The Staley family lived there too.”
“When did you leave?”
“Fifty years ago, the night of the Electric Park fire.”
“What’s Electric Park?”
“It was an amusement park at Forty-sixth and Troost, all kinds of rides, games, and pretty girls. I was there when it caught fire.”
He got a faraway look in his eyes, the memory coming back to him, nodding as the images came into focus.
“Man oh man, you should have seen it! That fire was a beast, chewing up the park. Hell, the whole place wasn’t more than a bunch of kindling glued together. You ever been in a blaze like that?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Well, trust me brother, you don’t want to be. Even the air was on fire, and the noise it made, I swear it was the devil’s own voice hollering Look out ’cause I’m coming for you. And the people running wild trying to get away wasn’t nothing but a mob the cops couldn’t control any more than the firemen could the fire.”
“What did you do?”
He smiled again, this time softly, shaking his head. “That devil voice, it was calling me, telling me it was time to chase the darkness, and I couldn’t do nothing except answer. But, I’ll tell you what, it taught me one of life’s most important lessons. One man’s trouble is another man’s chance if you’ve got the steel to take it.”
“I’ve got a feeling you’re not talking about picking up quarters someone left lying on the ground.”
“No sir. I was just a dumb kid couldn’t see farther than the end of my dick. Hated my parents because my old man beat my brother and me, and my mother didn’t give a shit so long as he didn’t hit us with any of her whiskey bottles. They was so beat down all they could do was beat someone weaker and smaller. I swore to Christ I wouldn’t end up like them. I was seventeen, and there were only two things I ever thought about: getting laid and getting out.”
“And the fire gave you a chance to get out.”
“You’re damn right it did. The smoke was so thick, I couldn’t see where I was going, and it didn’t help that no one else could either. I stumbled into the park office. The clerks had taken off, and the day’s receipts were just sitting there waiting to be burnt to ash, three thousand six hundred seventy eight dollars, a lot of money in those days and more than I’d ever seen or thought I ever would see. There was a satchel on the floor, and I stuffed it full of cash and took off. Had my stake and never looked back.”
“Where’d you go?”
He laughed. “Not as far as I thought I’d go but as far as the money took me. Got to Matamoros, a little border town in Mexico, before I blew it on a gal with big brown eyes and bigger tits who swore she loved me long enough to get me drunk and in bed. Next morning, she and the money were gone, and I was hungover and broke. So I walked back across the border into Brownsville, Texas, lied about my age, and enlisted in the army. Got sent to Korea and bought a ticket home with a bullet in my leg.”
“You came back to Kansas City fifty years later to see Lilly Chase. You ever go back to Matamoros to see that pretty girl?”
He laughed. “A time or two. Never did catch up to her though.”
“That’s some story.”
“Best part is that it’s true, enough of it anyway.”
He slapped me on the back, went inside, leaving me alone on the porch, realizing I still didn’t know where to find Brett Staley.
Chapter Sixty-two
They were gathered in the morning room, Roni on the sofa, hands folded in her lap, quiet but composed. Lilly stood next to the fireplace, turning her attention from Roni to Martha Chase, who was in her wheelchair, parked in front of the windows, both absent and present, her view limited to the squirrels chasing one another in the backyard. Terry Walker stood near Lilly, arms at his side, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, looking for a place to land. Kate sat in a chair across from the sofa, watching and listening, dissecting and cataloguing. No one looked my way when I entered the room.
“See to your mother,” Lilly said to Roni. “She needs to lie down.”
Roni rose from the couch, her head bowed, biting her lip. I followed Roni as she wheeled her mother from the room, down a hallway and to an elevator. She pushed the call button, and the elevator door opened.
“Sorry,” she said, backing the wheelchair into the elevator. “No room.”
I took the stairs, meeting them when the elevator reached the second floor. Roni didn’t speak as she pushed her mother past me and into a bedroom, closing the door and leaving me in the hall.
“We have to talk,” I said when she came out. She tried to walk past me, but I blocked her path. “You can be as angry as you like, but you have to talk to me.”
“Why?”
“Because Brett is in a lot of trouble.”
“And you’re the only one who can help him, right?”
“No, but I’m the only one willing to help him. You can help him, but you won’t.”
“There’s nothing I can do,” she said, bulling past me.
“Yes, you can. Tell me about your gun, the one used to kill Frank Crenshaw. What happened to it?”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I kept in my dresser drawer, with my underwear, like everyone else does. Grandma Lilly picked me up at the police station on Sunday after I shot Frank. When I came home, I took a shower, and when I opened my dresser drawer, it was gone.”
“Who knew that’s where you kept the gun?”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Just Grandma and Brett.”
“Then why are you protecting Brett, especially now?”
“Because he didn’t kill Frank or his father. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. And neither would my grandmother. I don’t know who took my gun or why, but it wasn’t Brett.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“You don’t believe me. Why would they? Now for the last time, leave me and my family alone.”
The hall where she’d left me ran the width of the house, intersecting at one end with another that extended from the front of the house to the rear. I took a quick walk through both corridors. What had once been a home to dozens of young women and girls had been remodeled into a series of suites, each with a sitting room, walk-in closets big enough for me to live in, and spacious bedrooms. Lilly’s was on the back of the house with a view of trees, their remaining leaves a collage of red, yellow, and orange. Roni’s was next to her mother’s, joined by connected bathrooms.
I made a quick search of her bedroom, finding nothing of significance. She was neat, but not obsessive. She had three books on her nightstand, one a mystery, one about running your own business, and one about understanding strokes. There were no guns, holsters, or ammunition and no love letters from Brett, though there was a framed picture of them, arm in arm, sporting smiles big enough to swallow one another.
Standing at the entrance to her bathroom, I had a clear view of Martha lying in bed on her back. It was a hospital-style bed with a mattress that adjusted up and down and side rails to keep her from falling out. Walking softly so as not to disturb her, I crossed both bathrooms and into her room, watching her chest rise and fall in a
