Kitty’s Hobby
by Jen Mierisch
In her retirement, Kitty Kester collected newspaper clippings about murders. Today’s addition to her album was a terribly satisfying tale.
A man named Jeffrey Knotts, age forty-one, had been walking on a downtown sidewalk when a blue Honda CRV swerved, ran him over, and careened triumphantly down Clinton Street, leaving its front bumper next to the body. The Tribune didn’t use the word “triumphantly,” but it came across. The reporter was very good.
Kitty pasted the article into her scrapbook and clucked her tongue. She had known Jeffrey Knotts at work, years ago. At the time, Kitty, who was the receptionist, had been in her mid-fifties and therefore invisible to men like Jeffrey, who strolled past Kitty’s desk with his eyes glued to the backsides of the college interns. He did worse things when he got them alone, and Kitty didn’t need the details, because she had once been a college intern herself. One by one, those poor young women quit, handing Kitty their badges with downcast eyes.
The gruesome fate that had befallen Jeffrey Knotts wasn’t sad at all. Kitty added a couple of stickers to tack down the edges of the clipping: smiling yellow suns, for joy.
Last month, Kitty had cut out a story about a man named Fabio Gurrola. An early-morning jogger had found Fabio dead on Foster Avenue, his corpse tossed against the concrete substructure of the Lake Shore Drive overpass. Based on how banged up Fabio was, the police figured someone had thrown him from a moving vehicle. But the autopsy showed that his cause of death was asphyxiation, though there wasn’t a mark on his neck or his face. Fabio Gurrola had done a few shady things in his life, like doing contractor work without pulling permits, but the cops couldn’t pin down a motive, and his wife had an airtight alibi. What an intriguing case!
Kitty shook her head in wonder as she glued down the latest Sun-Times story about Fabio Gurrola. She had lived here a long time, and she knew a lot of people, including Fabio’s wife, Elvina, who used to get her hair done at the same beauty parlor as Kitty. Elvina frequently arrived for her appointments with bruises on her arms, her face, or both, poorly disguised with cheap makeup.
Now Elvina could live out the rest of her life without that horrible man. What a wonderful development. Next to the article, Kitty doodled a little American flag, for freedom.
She sipped chamomile tea from her patterned china cup and rifled through her pages, savoring the stories, their tidy prose, their grisly details. Good heavens, the scrapbook was nearly full. She’d have to pick up a new one at the shop. But not now. It was almost time for her program, and Kitty Kester never missed an episode of Unsolved Death.
The doorbell rang.
Kitty scooted her chair back, rose achingly to her feet, and grumbled to herself. Hopefully it was just a delivery driver and not a yappy salesperson hawking one of those newfangled fiber-optic internet gadgets.
She opened the door to a man with a cheap suit, a plastic clipboard, and a political smile. Kitty recognized him immediately. This man had been in the newspaper many times, if young people like him even read newspapers anymore. Kitty sometimes wondered if she was singlehandedly keeping the local rags in business.
“Katherine Kester?” the man said. “I’m Ned Larabee, and I’m running for Congress. Might I have a moment of your time?”
“Please,” she said, “call me Kitty. Why don’t you come inside and have a cup of tea.”
“I wouldn’t want to trouble you, ma’am. And I’ve got quite a few more houses to—”
“You’ve got to be exhausted, pounding the pavement all day.” Kitty’s face was a picture of sympathy beneath white tufts of hair. “I insist. Did I mention that I intend to make a large donation to your campaign?”
“Well, I suppose, just for a minute…”
In the dining room, she swept the scrapbook supplies off the table. “What a hot day it is,” she remarked. “And you out walking in that heavy suit! Perhaps a cold drink might be better? Is cherry cola all right? It’s the store brand.”
“That’s fine.”
Kitty came out of the kitchen, set a sweating aluminum can in front of Ned, and seated herself across from him with her teacup. “Mr. Larabee,” she said, “I’m delighted you’ve stopped by. You’ve been our state representative for, what is it, a year now?”
“Four years.”
“My! How time does fly.” She smiled. “And now you aim to represent us at the national level?”
“That’s right.” Ned took a swig of his soda. He seemed unbothered that Kitty had opened the can before she brought it to him. Men had the luxury of never worrying about that. He made a funny face, and Kitty suppressed a smile. She kept sodas in the house for company, but she never drank them herself. You never knew what chemicals were in those things.
“Tell me how you plan to make our lives better, Mr. Larabee. Crime has certainly been on the uptick lately.”
Ned scratched his nose. “It certainly has. Protecting women is extremely important to our party, of course.”
“Of course.” Kitty sipped her tea and fixed her blue eyes on Ned.
“The first things we’ll work on are nationwide abortion regulations,” he went on. “Overturning Roe v. Wade was a great victory, but it didn’t go far enough.”
Kitty cocked her head. “I assume the procedure will still be available for rape victims and women whose health and lives are in danger?”
He shrugged. “We’ll see. Babies are the first priority. We’ll be saving six hundred thousand babies a year, Mrs. Kester.”
At the expense of how many women’s lives, Kitty did not ask. His shrug had already answered the question.
“You look like someone who understands traditional values,” Ned went on. “Wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the days when men were men and women were women?”
Kitty nodded, recalling the traditional values in which she’d been raised. The church that punished any woman who dared breach the boundaries of her prescribed role. The communities that had looked away, over and over again, when her father raised his hand to her mother and his children because he was the man of the house, and that’s all that mattered.
“I certainly do see where you’re coming from.” Kitty rose. “Well, now, let me go and find my purse. I hope cash is all right. I’m afraid I’ve misplaced my checkbook again.”
He was already at the door when she handed him the envelope. Kitty beamed. “Best of luck, Mr. Larabee.”
“Have a nice day, ma’am, and thanks for your contribution.”
She watched through the window as Ned Larabee made his way down the porch steps. He slipped the envelope out of his pocket, peeked inside, shook his head, and tucked the envelope away.
The substance he had ingested with his drink wouldn’t take effect for another twelve hours, at which point Ned Larabee would be in bed. His heart, too small and cold to care about women, would slow down, and then it would stop. He wasn’t married (Kitty might be old, but she knew how to Google), so the Lord only knew how long it would take for someone to find his body. No matter, because by then the poison would have deteriorated enough to be undetectable. Kitty had learned how to make it from one of her old chemistry textbooks. Nobody would hire a woman as a chemist when she’d graduated college, but it was a delightful hobby.
Even if Ned had told someone about the old lady who’d invited him in that day (and why would he, after her unexciting donation), nobody would comb through his constituent lists to find Kitty. Nobody ever did. Certainly not A-1 Contractors, who had sent Fabio Gurrola out to the abandoned house across the alley from Kitty’s, where she had let him into the garage, clocked him over the head with a snow shovel, started the car she’d parked in there, and locked him in. Certainly not the Chicago police, who hadn’t traced the vehicle that ran over Jeffrey Knotts. Kitty had borrowed that car from the dirt lot behind her nephew-in-law’s auto body shop. If the pigs had been motivated to find that front-bumperless blue Honda CRV, they’d have had six hundred similar lots to look through.
Soon enough, the Sun-Times or the Tribune would publish a piece about Ned Larabee. Maybe it would even make the front page. Kitty would lovingly cut out the article to add to her collection, and next to it she would paint little gold trophies, for victory.