Deadlocked

Chapter 16

Mason closed the phone book without writing down a single number. He knew what the King case was about and what he wanted to ask the jurors. He didn't know what he would say to the pallbearers. Tell me about my parents, he could ask them. Another question: why don't I know you? Is there anything I should know about my parents that my aunt, my closest living relative, the woman who raised me, left out of the family history, because if there is, I would really like to know. And, while we're at it, do you have any idea why Claire kept the truth about my parents from me?

Real ice breakers, Mason admitted. Should warm these old folks right up. They would at least be older folks. Mason did the math, guessing they had been contemporaries of his parents then in their thirties, adding forty years, dividing their memories by the passage of time. The remainder a mix of what was and what should have been. He came back to the central question, cast in the tones of political scandals. What did Claire know and when did she know it? Mason wasn't ready to investigate his aunt, at least not until he gave her the chance to answer his questions first.

Linwood Boulevard is an east-west commercial artery that would have been called Thirty-third Street if the city hadn't named it after Mr. Linwood. Main Street runs north and south from the Missouri River through midtown, an entrepreneurial stretch that dwindles into a residential track south of the Country Club Plaza.

Claire's office was on Linwood, just east of Main, in a pre-World War II whitewashed stucco house, grand in its day, with a broad front porch, bay windows, and a gabled roof. The house had been bought, sold, and abandoned. Restored and subdivided into apartments, neglected by its tax-deduction driven owner, abandoned again. Claire bought it at a tax foreclosure sale, rehabbed it with Harry's help on weekends until she was ready to hang her shingle from the front door, her office on the first floor, her home on the second. She'd lived and worked there for a year.

"I lived in that house of yours for so long, I just got itchy. I'm glad you got married so I could give it to you and get rid of it," she said when she explained to Mason why she had bought the new house. "Though I'm just as glad you got it in the property settlement with Kate."

"What was the matter with the place you had downtown?" Mason had asked her.

"The loft was fine for a while. I liked being around the young people who lived there until they started calling me their house mother. The older I get, the more I need to keep changing things to keep life interesting."

The neighborhood was a mix of rough and rehabbed, box stores and liquor stores, down-and-outers and up-and-comers, midway between downtown and the high-rise condo gold coast of the Country Club Plaza. Claire's clients, she explained to Mason, felt comfortable there, finding encouragement in her ability to make something out of nothing, a task often too difficult in their own lives.

Claire was at her desk, working her way through a stack of papers. Glancing up with a smile when Mason walked in, she took off her reading glasses, leaving them dangling from a beaded chain around her neck. She had a big frame, adding an imposing physical dimension to the passion she brought to her causes, offering warmth to those who needed her, presenting an immovable object to those who opposed her. Claire ignored convention more than she defied it. She paid little attention to her white hair, wore no makeup, and was a fashion disaster, proving the last with the brown Capri pants and orange blouse she was wearing.

"Slow day?" she asked Mason, as he looked around her office.

Mason pursed his lips. "So-so," he answered.

"Well, mine isn't," she said, holding up a thick document. "Look at this," she said, shaking the papers. "This brief is two inches of utter crap. A crooked contractor duped my client into borrowing thirty thousand dollars to make improvements on a house that wasn't worth thirty thousand to begin with, did a lousy job, and left the house uninhabitable. That crook hooked my client up with a crooked finance company that loaned her the money and wants to foreclose because she can't pay and she shouldn't pay them a nickel. I sued the bastards for a hundred and one violations of every federal and state law I could think of and their weenie lawyers are trying to bury me in a paper blizzard."

"I wouldn't want to be those weenie lawyers or their crooked clients," Mason said.

"Neither would I," Claire agreed. "Now you didn't come here to listen to me rant. Sit down and talk to me."

Claire loathed beating around bushes. Mason took a chair opposite her desk, handing her his parents' obituary, the names of the pallbearers highlighted in bright yellow.

"Tell me about these men," he said.

"There's nothing to tell. They were pallbearers at your parents' funeral."

"Did you know them?"

"Of course I knew them. I chose them."

"Why haven't I ever heard their names before? They must have been my parents' closest friends."

Claire fingered the obituary like it was sharp-edged glass, studying the names. "I gave you this, and the newspaper article, so you could read for yourself what happened to your parents. I should have known that answering one question for you would only lead to another."

"More than one other question," Mason said. "The real question is why you've never told me any of this before and why getting anything out of you now is like pulling teeth."

"Tell me something," she said, leaning forward, elbows on her desk. "Did I do a bad job raising you?"

"No," he answered.

"Did you ever want for anything? Did you ever feel unloved, even for a second?"

"You know I didn't. But that's not the point."

"It is exactly the point," Claire said, stabbing the air with the side of her hand. "It's why you never asked, not once, about any of this. I told you what happened to your parents as soon as you were old enough to understand. I told you that your parents were good people and that was true. That was all you wanted to know. I took you to that damn cemetery so you wouldn't forget them."

She was right. Mason had never pushed Claire for more details. He'd only thought of his parents when he wondered what his life would have been like had they lived. He had no memories of their voices, touch, or love to make him miss them in anything but the abstract. He'd never explored their lives, content to grow up in a world that began with him and his aunt, as if he'd materialized out of the ether on her front step. Never wanting to know about the past, it was easy for Claire to keep him focused on the future and what he would make of it.

"I may not have asked then," he said, "but you didn't want me to ask either. Well, I'm asking now."

Claire held his stare, not answering. She was, he knew, incapable of lying to him, choosing silence instead. Mason finally nodded and stood, taking the obituary from her and leaving, neither of them saying another word.