She stopped spinning and said, “Hey, you,” like we’d known each other for years. Looked to be in her early twenties but had the effervescent spirit of a toddler. I responded to her greeting with an eye blink, stunned silent by I don’t know what. The friendliness so uncharacteristic of downtown? The brazen disregard for warmth or dryness?
She said, “Should’ve grabbed you an umbrella policy while you were in there, huh?” and then she laughed.
With her eyes.
A throaty chuckle followed a perfect smile, but it was her eyes that laughed. Blue eyes. Light blue. People call it ice blue, though I’ve never seen ice that color.
“Excuse me?” I managed, now wondering if she’d been in the insurance office and somehow my great detective skills had missed her.
She laughed and said, “You came out of the State Farm place down there, right? It looked like you did. I was making a joke. Insurance places sell umbrella policies, and you’re out here without an umbrella. Hello? Is this thing on?” And there was the laugh again.
“Oh. Yeah. Right,” I said. “Actually, I did get an umbrella policy, but they forgot to give me the umbrella.” I was so witty.
“Bastards,” she said, and her eyes laughed, lighting up the gray day.
“Dog lover?” she asked next.
She must have seen the confusion on my face because then she added, “I got dogs, brats, and Polish sausage. You look like a dog lover.”
“Yeah. A dog would be great,” I said, despite the fact that Roland Park and I had devoured a full breakfast not more than an hour before.
Her tongs grabbed a juicy link and flipped it end over end into a bun. She Grouchoed her eyebrows up and down, mocking her own talent with the tongs.
“You must be a professional” was the wittiest thing I could come up with.
“Not anymore,” she said without missing a beat. “I went pro for a few years, but the hotels and groupies took their toll. I got back my amateur status last spring. Now I just do it for the love.”
I took the hot dog and a coffee, paid her, and, as she handed over my change, managed, “So you like to spin in the rain.”
“Don’t you?” she asked, then proceeded to give me a three-hundred-sixty-degree turn. “Spinning is good for the soul. Especially when it rains. Come on, try it.”
I watched her throw her head back and let the sky shower down on her flawless face, eyes wide open.
“Shouldn’t you close your eyes when you do that?”
“I never close my eyes,” she said. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
I realized – she wasn’t crazy. She was happy.
“I think my spinning days are over.”
“Why?” she asked, still turning circles.
“Too old.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m too old too. I’ve been too old for years. Sucks, doesn’t it?”
“How old are you?” I asked, sure I was about to be labeled a dirty old man.
“Nineteen. You?”
“More than nineteen.”
“Ah, you’re like my aunt. Major hang-up about her age.”
“Forty-two,” I confessed.
She stopped spinning and said, “Holy crap!” Then her eyes, her whole body, laughed. “Just kidding. Forty-two isn’t old. No age is old unless you feel old.”
“I feel pretty old sometimes.”
“You should spin more.”
My cell phone rang. It was Roland, asking me if I wanted him to come and get me. I said no, told him I was on my way in.
“Boss want you back at work?” she asked.
“No, my partner.”
She looked me up and down, laughed, and said, “Must be a cop. If you were a lawyer, you’d have an umbrella.”
I stuck out my hand and said, “Jim Dandridge. Detective.”
“Kayla Lightfoot. Spinning dog flipper of Delmar and Jefferson.”
My hand covered hers. I’m a little over six feet and a lot over two hundred pounds. She was maybe five-two or three and barely over a hundred pounds, including the rain. I let go of her hand, and there was a moment – couldn’t have been more than a second or two – where I just stared into those laughing eyes.
The rain fell harder, and she said, “Your dog’s getting wet. And I don’t mean that the way it sounds.” She laughed, then turned to a pair of city workers who had walked up to her cart.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I probably ate about six hot dogs a week. Kayla Lightfoot was always there, smiling, spinning, and laughing. She told me about her love of jazz – introduced to her by her aunt – and her favorites, Cannonball Adderley and Louis Armstrong. She asked my opinion as a cop about her theory that if more people listened to the Cannonball Adderley Quintet and Louis Armstrong, there would be less crime. I agreed.
“So, if you like Cannonball, you must like Miles and Coltrane.”
“Who?”
“You know Cannonball Adderley, but you don’t know who Miles Davis is?”
It was the only time I’d ever seen the light go out of her eyes. But as quickly as it went out, the light reappeared, and she was going on and on about Louis Armstrong and his amazing voice, and how, if you really looked around, it is a wonderful world.
IT WAS RAINING as I drove up Clark to Jefferson. Typical St. Louis January – twenty degrees and snow last week, forty-five and rain this. I saw the familiar hot-dog cart as I climbed out of my Impala. The rain was the same drizzling rain like the day I’d met her, but there was no steam coming from the cart. I remembered her telling me that, even though most vendors shut down after dark, she stays out until ten or later because “You never know when someone’s been working late, had no time to eat, and just needs a dog.”
Kayla Lightfoot’s arms were outstretched like I’d seen so many times. Her face was again looking straight up into the rain. But she wasn’t spinning.
And her eyes weren’t laughing.
Her body was sprawled next to the cart, half in, half out of the street. Her legs were up on the sidewalk, her torso hanging across the curb, her head and shoulders on the asphalt of Delmar Boulevard. I don’t know how long I stared at her. Eventually, one of the two patrol officers that were there put his hand on my arm and asked if I was okay.
“Sure,” I told him, not taking my eyes off Kayla’s open, lifeless light-blue eyes. “Yeah, sure.”
“We haven’t checked for ID,” he said. “Didn’t want to touch the body, fuck up your crime scene.”
“Her name’s Kayla Lightfoot,” I said. I knelt down and looked at what appeared to be a fairly deep stab wound, running about four or five inches up the right side of her abdomen. “Where’s all the blood?”
I must have said it out loud because the patrolman offered, “Probably washed down the gutter there. You know, on account of the rain.”
I sprang up. “I want a fucking crime-scene perimeter. From the insurance office down on Jefferson all the way to there. Now!”
The patrolmen shared a glance and moved off. I looked back down at Kayla. She was wearing those cargo-type pants she favored – the ones that sit so low on the hips, you think they can’t possibly stay on. She had on a white turtleneck – same one she’d worn four days ago – but where was her jacket?
I looked around the cart. Nothing. She always had that thing on. Said it was from… where? Eddie Bauer? L.L.Bean? One of those types of places. It was lavender. Quilted. Hooded, with a strip of fake white fur around the edge. Said her aunt gave it to her. My detective mind kicked in. Was she killed for the jacket? A homeless person, maybe.
I looked up and down Jefferson, then Delmar. Visibility was lousy because of the rain. Was there a homeless person wearing Kayla’s jacket right now? Sitting in some doorway, all warm and cozy, using the rain to wash off their knife blade?
I yelled at the patrolmen to call in more officers. I called the Homicide Squad and said I needed every available body. I wanted the area saturated with cops. Roust every homeless person they can find. Question anyone and everyone within a five-mile radius.