A Man to Die for by Eileen Dreyer Page B

greatest societies, and a chronic inferiority complex. It was a crazy quilt of separate entities bumping and sidling against each other like passing acquaintances in a row of too-small plane seats that promote politeness but discourage curiosity.
    This attitude had everything to do with why no one thought to look any sooner for Wanda Trigel. First of all, she disappeared from Arnold. A burgeoning Jefferson County city tucked into the southern side of the Meramec and Mississippi river merger, Arnold had long been one of the northern stops for migratory traffic along Highway 55. Poor, white, hard-line right-wingers, the initial core of Arnold had given the city its perception in the bi-state area.
    The locals divided Arnold into three distinct areas, like the lobes of a lung. Upper Arnold was as upscale as it got, with its newer subdivisions and Walmart shopping centers. Lower Arnold, or LA, comprised an area of good old boys and girls, trailer parks and taverns. Life was hard, heads harder. Arguments were settled with pool cues and broken bottles, and the drug of choice was Busch.
    The third area was UCLA, where Wild Woman had lived with Buddy. UCLA, or the Upper Corner of Lower Arnold, was where the river rats lived, the meanest form of life in the entire area. The police wore jackboots and the denizens stayed in the flood plain because they didn’t have the means or the inclination to escape. Anybody who didn’t like country music was a pussy, white supremacy was considered a religion, and the average entertainment entailed the illegal, the immoral, and the fattening. Anything went, and usually did.
    The Millard boys ran that neck of the woods with brawn, bully, and the first automatic weapons south of St. Louis. Which was the second reason nobody thought much about Wanda’s disappearance. She was a Millard, and apples didn’t fall far from the tree.
    The Arnold police department knew that, and so did Wanda’s friends. They’d partied with her and even followed her onto home turf on one or two unspeakably foolish occasions. If Wanda finally tired of respectability, nobody could really find themselves surprised.
    But no one thought to raise an outcry. The Creve Coeur police, who patrolled the area where Wanda worked, and the Jefferson County sheriff, who had jurisdiction over the last place she’d been seen, didn’t think to get involved. It was Arnold’s problem, and Arnold’s attitude was that it was just a family problem. Just another woman who’d run out. What with the daily struggle to keep the peace in the, growing, volatile area just south of St. Louis County, the police and sheriff figured they had more important things to worry about.
    As for the Millard boys, they agreed with the police.
    For Casey’s part, she was a typical St. Louisan. Born and raised in Webster Groves, a solidly middle-class neighborhood in the near southwest section of St. Louis County, she had moved only as far as Creve Coeur for her freedom, and then Frontenac to marry. And now, she was home where she was perfectly comfortable shopping and entertaining within a ten-mile radius, where she was caught up more with her neighbors’ problems than the county’s, or the city’s beyond.
    Wanda was consigned to another world, to Casey’s past at Izzy’s, to another county where she had no control and very little contact, to a lifestyle that Casey minimalized through indifference.
    The word of Wanda’s disappearance lingered because the idea of Wanda and Hunsacker dueling was so delicious, but it didn’t capture Casey’s imagination or concern. Preoccupied with work, with her nagging disillusionment, with the spring holy days, Casey lost track of Wanda within days of her disappearance.
     
    The Who spilled from Casey’s headset and rain seeped in around the edges of her hood. It was a drizzly day, gray and indifferent, sapping even that fresh spring green from the young trees. Casey couldn’t imagine why she wanted to be out walking.