Houston Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction

  PART I: DESIRABLE LOCATIONS WITH PRIVATE SECURITY

  Tangled

  Anton DiSclafani

  Tanglewood

  One in the Family

  Adrienne Perry

  Museum District

  The Use of Landscape

  Robert Boswell

  River Oaks

  PART II: PEACEFUL HAMLETS, GREAT FOR FAMILIES

  A Dark Universe

  Larry Watts

  Clear Lake

  Xitlali Zaragoza, Curandera

  Reyes Ramirez

  Spring

  Photo Album

  Sarah Cortez

  Downtown

  PART III: MINUTES FROM DOWNTOWN AND NIGHTLIFE

  Where the Ends Meet

  Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton

  Acres Homes

  Tolerance

  Tom Abrahams

  Third Ward

  City of Girls

  Leslie Contreras Schwartz

  Aldine

  Miles’s Blues

  Wanjiku Wa Ngugi

  Montrose

  PART IV: UP-AND-COMING AREAS, NEWLY REVITALIZED

  Happy Hunting

  Icess Fernandez Rojas

  North Shore

  The Falls of Westpark

  Pia Pico

  Westpark Corridor

  Railway Track

  Sehba Sarwar

  Lawndale

  Jamie’s Mother

  Stephanie Jaye Evans

  Sunset Heights

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  A CRUEL, CRAZY TOWN

  It’s a rare publisher who’ll let you write something really dark.

  “What about the book clubs?” I’ve heard editors say. “Book clubs want something light to read while drinking wine, Gwen. Can you lighten it up?”

  I can lighten it up, yes. I can even lighten up in general. But it hurts a little to do so, and a little more every time. It feels like lying, and until a writer sells film rights, lying feels like selling out.

  That’s why it gave me immense pleasure to be charged with (and to charge for!) editing this book. It was pleasurable from the very beginning, when I contacted writers I knew and writers I wanted to know and invited them to write me something noir-ish. Several were already practiced in the dark (literary) arts and agreed off the bat. Others were unsure. “I’ve never written noir,” they told me. For those, I put on a pair of horns, picked up a pitchfork, and said, “But you could, couldn’t you? Don’t you have a story you’ve been wanting to tell—something tragic? Something full of anger? Something totally fucked up?”

  I saw the glints in their eyes, right through the e-mails on my monitor. Oh yes—they had ideas.

  Then I received more e-mails, texts, and confessions over frozen mojitos: “My god . . . Writing this stuff is so much fun. I like it.” And I reveled in my newfound power to warp talented minds.

  Then I received the stories. Oh man, the stories. They hurt me. They burned. Some made me cringe, some made me cry. One made me push away my laptop and hoot very loudly, like a barn owl overcome with shock and revulsion. Others made me laugh . . . then hate myself for laughing.

  It turned out I had no power, after all—only the means to extend invitations to people with true power. Their writing toyed with my emotions, overwhelmed me, and left me weak.

  I thought of you, then.

  You, who like to read alone. And you who binge tear-jerking movies on Thanksgiving. You, the ones who laugh inappropriately at serious moments and draw disgusted glares. Who watch the latest awful news and roll your eyes, thinking, This is probably just what we deserve.

  If you also live in this city I love, then you definitely know the effort required to lighten up and the futility thereof. You can’t ignore the mentally ill people shouting between our beautiful towers of glass. You’ve tasted the sugarcoating of words like Generously sponsored by Enron and Hundred-year floodplain, and you spit it out. You’ve heard the promises that things will get better, and yet you’re stocked up on canned goods, bottled water, and ammo. You know happy endings don’t come easy, and a World Series win doesn’t ease the pain of decades of football heartbreak.

  And yet you stay.

  I know what you’re looking for: someone to lay it on the line. Something to make you feel less alone, less misunderstood. A fucked-up story to indulge in, and not (for once) because you had no choice.

  * * *

  The stories in this book are sectioned by neighborhood type, using euphemisms and clichés local realtors employ to sell our socioeconomic topography. Their settings range wide across the three near-concentric circles of cement that define our city. There’s the Inner Loop, or Interstate 610, that encircles our Downtown, our trendiest enclaves, and our oldest neighborhoods that, as of this writing, represent every phase of the gentrification cycle and all the seething resentment that engenders.

  Our second ring of hell humidity, between the Loop and Beltway 8, is the middle ground for Houstonians who can’t afford the Inner Loop but don’t want to spend more than an hour on the freeway per commute. Then comes FM 1960 (or State Highway 6) and the first layer of our true suburbs. Beyond that is an expanse of land being chewed up, bit by bit, by the city’s maw.

  In a 2004 essay, Hunter S. Thompson described Houston as a “cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West—which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.” For what it’s worth, that quote is now posted on a banner somewhere downtown and regularly, gleefully repeated by our local feature writers.

  Houston is a port city on top of a swamp and, yes, it has no zoning laws. And that means it’s culturally diverse, internally incongruous, and ever-changing. At any intersection here, I might look out my car window and see a horse idly munching St. Augustine grass. And, within spitting distance of that horse, I might see a “spa” that’s an obvious brothel, a house turned drug den, or a swiftly rising bayou that might overtake a car if the rain doesn’t let up. Because I’ve lived here so long, there’s no story in this book I can’t easily imagine taking place. Some of the plots might seem outrageous, but not compared with real-life crimes that have taken place here in the last fifty years, which have inspired books, TV movies, and Wikipedia-readers’ nightmares.

  River Oaks, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the state, has been home to politicians, Texan and Saudi oil barons, pastor Joel Osteen, and Jeff Skilling of Enron infamy. From 1969 to 1973, the neighborhood was rocked by the mysterious death of socialite horsewoman Joan Robinson Hill, the subsequent murder of her husband Dr. John Hill, and the murder of his murderer after that. This story is immortalized in Blood and Money by Thomas Thompson.

  Between 1970 and 1973, serial killer and Heights resident Dean Corll, nicknamed the Candy Man, murdered at least twenty-eight people. The Halloween after that, optician Ronald Clark O’Bryan became Houston’s second Candy Man—killing his son Timothy for the insurance money, by feeding him poisoned Pixy Stix. O’Bryan tried to cover up his crime by giving the poisoned candy to his daughter and three other children as well, spawning a generation of trick-or-treat fears.

  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, orthopedic surgeon and Museum District resident Eric Hesto
n Scheffey came under fire for performing unnecessary surgeries that disabled and sometimes killed his patients. In 2005, his license to practice medicine was finally revoked.

  In 2002, Friendswood dentist Clara Harris was convicted of manslaughter for running over her cheating husband with a Mercedes-Benz in the parking lot of a Hilton hotel, with his daughter in the car, while filmed by the private investigator she’d hired.

  In 2007, astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak drove from Houston to the airport in Orlando, Florida, where she attacked and failed to kidnap US Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, the new girlfriend of Nowak’s former boyfriend, astronaut William Oefelein.

  Several of the stories in this book discuss human trafficking. According to a study by the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Social Work, there were an estimated 313,000 victims of human trafficking in the state in 2016. Houston is widely considered a hub for such activity due to its port, its proximity to Mexico, and its many conventions and sporting events.

  Right now, Houston is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in America. That creates opportunities for clashes and crimes in a wide variety of cultural combinations, throughout the city. This, too, is poignantly reflected in these stories.

  Overall, this collection represents the very worst our city has to offer, for residents and visitors alike. But it also presents some of our best voices, veteran and emerging, to any reader lucky enough to pick up this book.

  Congratulations!

  Gwendolyn Zepeda

  Houston, Texas

  February 2019

  PART I

  DESIRABLE LOCATIONS WITH PRIVATE SECURITY

  TANGLED

  by Anton DiSclafani

  Tanglewood

  Tangled in Tanglewood, Lisa thought as she glanced at her watch and stepped out onto her back porch.

  The heat overwhelmed, because it was July in Houston and everyone who could go was gone, out to Galveston or Clear Lake or even farther. The Blue Ridge Mountains. The Great Lakes. The Olsens would leave first. Then the Ramirezes. Then the Maclains.

  Lisa had not left not because she didn’t want to leave—she did, very badly—but because she had a few things to set in order, first. And then she would leave for good. Or, if not for good, for a very long time.

  She stood on her porch, protected from the mosquitoes and no-see-ums by a thin layer of screen. She glanced at her watch again. It had been her grandmother’s, was what she told people. A slim Cartier with a face encircled by diamonds. No one wore watches anymore.

  Lisa did.

  * * *

  In short order, Lisa’s history: Born to a father who worked the oil rigs in Midland, a godforsaken place. A mother who, when Lisa was young, tried to keep the dust out of their house without the aid of a vacuum cleaner. Only the rich people had them.

  Even now, or especially now, Lisa closes her eyes and can so easily see her mother with her broom. The sweep, sweep that will haunt Lisa until she dies.

  Lisa married a boy who lived in a two-story dustless house. At the time, the house had seemed a sign of great wealth. They were both sixteen. A shotgun wedding, nobody happy but Lisa and her new husband. Moved to La Porte so Gary could do something related to the ships. Then Pasadena. Got closer and closer to Houston, inch by inexorable inch.

  Victoria was born in La Porte. Lisa thought her daughter’s name sounded regal. Like old money. Or old enough for Texas, anyway.

  By the time they moved to Houston, Lisa had shed her mother and father and their dust. Her father had left when Lisa was eight, gone out west, and her mother became a recluse before she died of lung cancer. It was easy never to tell a soul about them.

  So, her parents were dead when she landed in Houston in the early eighties, in a bland, nondescript neighborhood. Solidly middle class. Gary was loyal, dull except for his terrible temper, and the victim of early-onset balding. She knew it wasn’t nice, but his hair, or lack thereof, repulsed her.

  They divorced when Victoria was ten. Victoria was so sensitive then, she might as well have been a tuning fork, and for a while Lisa worried the divorce had ruined her. For years, Victoria slept with her mother at night, the child’s warmth a comfort. Most days, Victoria came home from school in tears, disturbed by the minor cruelty of one girl or another.

  The divorce didn’t ruin her. Neither did Lisa’s second marriage, two years later, to a cardiac surgeon who owned a home in Tanglewood. To the contrary, that marriage seemed to harden Victoria, laying a chitin over her creamy, adolescent skin. She’d never gotten pimples like other girls. That Victoria felt betrayed by her mother—it had been just the two of them for two years—was to be expected. But Lisa knew better. The marriage meant neither she nor Victoria would have to worry. About college, about paying for the wedding Victoria would eventually have, about any of life’s requirements. And Lisa was lonely. She didn’t want Victoria to grow up thinking this loneliness, this all-female household, was normal. And, most of all, there was the house.

  Tanglewood: it felt like the center of things, yet the lots the houses sat on seemed enormous to Lisa. It wasn’t privacy she craved, nor space, but she knew, the moment she saw the house, she would accept Lance’s proposal. It was one of the older houses, with black shutters and a wide wraparound porch. Lance hadn’t proposed yet, but he would. Men were as readable as books.

  Tanglewood did not smack of carpet and coupons. It was not one but five steps above where she’d lived with Gary. Not River Oaks and not Shady Side—places she’d once dreamed of—but close enough. Her entire life defined by an exhilarating momentum. Lately, it was also tinged with exhaustion.

  How different her mother’s life would have been, had she owned a vacuum cleaner, Lisa thought whenever she saw hers.

  * * *

  Mornings, she liked to go outside and look at the other houses. She could just barely see them from her screened-in back porch. Flashes of stucco and brick through the neat row of sky pencils that bordered the backyard.

  Lance opened the sliding-glass door. Lisa didn’t turn or give any sign she’d heard her husband as he brushed her forehead with his dry, hot lips. She sat in the porch swing as wide as a bed and held her coffee carefully so it wouldn’t spill.

  “Bye,” he said on his way out, and waited for her response.

  “Bye,” she said, and he was gone. They had not met each other’s eye.

  Victoria opened the porch door a minute later, as if she’d timed it. She’d told Lisa, when she was twelve, that she’d never think of Lance as a father, and she never had. There was no love lost between them. She held a cup of coffee from her own home, a street over. She had large, capable hands. Lisa had always admired them.

  Lisa and her daughter had coffee together most mornings. Victoria held Lisa at a distance, and had since her mother remarried, but still, they were close. There were other mother-daughter pairs in Houston, of course. It was a big city that felt like a small town, especially in Tanglewood, where everyone gathered at the Houston Country Club for cocktails on Saturday evenings, where everyone’s child went to Kinkaid, where everyone’s husband left for work before the worst of the heat started and came home after it ended.

  “Hi,” Lisa said.

  A pause. “Hi.” Victoria seemed distracted. She was wearing the sleek lounge pants women her age favored. She was tall and fleshy but not fat; prettier than her mother, but not as confident. Victoria knew how to plan and host a five-course dinner party, invest in the stock market, and get the yardmen to edge the grass in a way they considered fussy, but she didn’t know how to move through a room sexily. It was a quality that couldn’t be taught, Lisa supposed.

  “You sound sleepy,” Lisa said carefully. She wasn’t a religious woman, but she found herself praying lately that Victoria wouldn’t get pregnant. Lord, she thought, let her be smart enough to take the pill. Her husband wasn’t the kind of man to want to prevent a pregnancy.

  “I am. Tired,” Victoria said.

  “Did he do it agai
n?” Lisa tried to keep the tremor from her voice.

  Victoria shook her head. “No.” She sounded annoyed, dismissive.

  “It’s just—”

  “Mom. It was a one-time thing.”

  Lisa nodded. She hated that word: Mom. Mother was unwieldy, old-fashioned. She would have preferred Mama, but Victoria hadn’t called her that since she was a little girl, still losing baby teeth.

  Lisa tried to look as if she believed her daughter. Her plan depended, for the moment, on her willingness to believe.

  “So hot,” Victoria said, which seemed to be an olive branch.

  “Yes,” Lisa murmured, “yes.” She was eager to agree.

  Victoria pulled a chair away from the table and slumped into it. Lisa was often struck by how young she still seemed, even though her daughter was thirty, married to a corporate attorney, in charge of a house. “Speaking of which, the yard is dry as a bone. The water restrictions.” She sighed. “I’m tired of this drought.”

  Lance had returned, was plucking his phone from the counter. He lifted his hand in a silent wave; Lisa returned it. Victoria tilted her head but otherwise did not acknowledge Lance. They had never fought, but they had never loved each other, either. Lisa supposed she should be grateful that their relationship, if not intimate, was peaceful.

  Lisa took a sip of her coffee. It was cold. Victoria seemed lost in thought. Well, Lisa had plenty of her own to think about. Her daughter who was beaten. Abused. When her own husband would sooner cut his hand off than lay it on Lisa.

  Lance was cheating on her. With, Lisa was almost certain, Patsy Olsen. Patsy had thick, bluntly cut silver hair. She was pretty and a decade older than Lisa. It was the way things had gone in their marriage for a very long time. But it wouldn’t go on for much longer.

  Victoria was now talking about volunteering and a woman they both knew who headed a committee. “Can you believe it?” she asked, her voice mildly outraged.

  “No,” Lisa said, though she didn’t know what it was she couldn’t believe. Their rhythm, long established, was off today. She glanced at her watch.

  “We better get moving,” Victoria said, smiling. Lisa was amazed at her daughter’s happiness. Or if not happiness, light-heartedness. That she could grin, her big, pretty teeth flashing against her dark lip gloss. That she could utter such meaningless platitudes: “Mom.” Less a name than a command. “It was only the one time. I promise.” When Lisa knew for a fact she was lying. And anyway, it was never just the one time. Not in life. Not in any part of it.