Motion to Kill

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Hey, good to see you,” Mason said, his hand outstretched. It was a friendly gesture. Appropriate for greeting someone he hadn’t seen in six months and who had agreed to help him out without even negotiating a fee in advance.

Blues ignored his hand, his gaze locked on the distance.

“What are you going to do to him?” Blues asked.

“Who? The guy who hit my client? I’m going to sue the son of a bitch.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Nothing. That’s why I wanted you to find him. I need to find out who his insurance company is so I can put them on notice.”

Blues swept his hand across the view. “What do you see out there?”

Mason started to make a smart-ass remark, like “Not the guy you were supposed to find for me,” when he remembered his last piano lesson. There was a message here and he wasn’t getting it.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“Over there,” Blues said, pointing to the west. “That’s the Kansas River. The Indians called it the Kaw, and that spot, where it pours into the Missouri-right where the Missouri bends to the east-they called that Kawsmouth. Not very original. But it makes the point. Down there, where I-70 cuts across the downtown, that was all bluffs-just like this. Right down to the banks of the Missouri. Back in the 1870s, they dug out those bluffs to make the streets. At first they just cut the streets out of the bluffs, like gullies. They even called it Gullytown for a while, instead of Kansas City. To the west, over there, in those old warehouses that are used for haunted houses at Halloween-that’s the West Bottoms. More hogs and cattle were slaughtered there than you could ever imagine. Ten thousand people worked there when the meatpacking business was booming. Lot of people got rich. Not one of them an Indian.”

“I know there’s a point to this and I do appreciate the history lesson, but where’s my drunk?”

Blues made another quarter turn to the southwest. “Over that way, back into Kansas-you can’t really see it from here-is where the government put the Shawnee tribe to get them out of the way of all that progress. They kept moving the tribes farther west, each time promising them that they could have those lands forever. Course, it didn’t work out that way.”

“Look, if this is some kind of sensitivity test, let me know. I’ll tell you the story about my Jewish ancestors sneaking out of their Lithuanian village in the middle of the night so that they wouldn’t be killed in the monthly pogrom. They ended up here with a set of candlesticks and nothing else. My great-grandfather helped cut the stones they used for those streets and my grandfather slaughtered his share of those animals. Nobody said it was fair. I don’t need for you to know about that or to give a shit. I just want to know if you found my drunk.”

Blues looked at him with a half smile. “Just wanted you to know, that’s all.”

“Know what?”

“I’ve got more faith in my system of justice than in the one you’re going to use to squeeze a few bucks out of your drunk’s insurance company. I’ll help you when I want to and you’ll pay me. I don’t like what you’re doing or I decide I don’t like you-that’s it. That’s my justice system.”

“Fair enough. But if I don’t get my drunk, you don’t get paid.”

“I’ve got your drunk. By the way,” he added with mock surprise, “I didn’t know Mason was a Jewish name.”

Mason couldn’t hold back his grin. “Yeah? Well, I guess that means we’re even since I didn’t know there were any Indian piano players.”

Their arrangement had worked well over the years. Blues could find just about anyone who didn’t want to be found and find out most things that people didn’t want someone else to know. And he did it with a confidence and fearlessness that made it difficult for people to resist. When they did, they regretted it.

Blues didn’t volunteer much about himself. Eventually Mason strung together enough bits and pieces to know that he’d been married and divorced before he was twenty, served in the army special forces, and spent six years as a cop in Kansas City.

He quit the police force after he shot and killed a woman suspected of smothering her baby to stop her from crying. Blues never went into the details except to say that the brass gave him the choice to quit or be fired. He quit being a cop but kept playing piano and moonlighting as a freelance problem solver.

Mason suspected that something more than reading history had shaped Blues’s uncompromising solutions for the problems people brought to him. But Mason had yet to turn over that rock. Nor could Mason explain why Blues had agreed to help him with the drunk and his other cases he’d needed help with since he quit playing piano. The one time he’d asked, Blues told him it was the only way he could make certain that Mason didn’t start playing again.

They met for breakfast Wednesday morning at a midtown diner where the upwardly mobile have breakfast and the down-and-out spend hours with a cup of coffee.

“Sounds like you and your pinstriped partners are in deep shit, man,” Blues said after Mason finished telling him what had happened over the last three days. “You want me to watch your back until this is over?”

“You think my back needs to be watched?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You’ve got one dead partner and somebody wants you to either join him or be convicted for killing him.”

Mason couldn’t ignore the warning in Blues’s offer. His willingness to accept it after he’d turned down a similar offer from Kelly was more than a little sexist. He resolved to work on his gender insecurity just as soon as people stopped trying to kill him.

“I’ve never had someone watch my back before. Is that a hard thing to do?”

“Easier than teaching you to play the piano.”

“Do I get more than one hour a week?”

“I’ll be around as much as I can. Most of the time, you won’t know it, but I won’t have you covered all the time. You’ll have to be careful.”

“I’ll just talk into my collar so the bad guys will think I’ve got backup around the corner. In the meantime, I don’t have a clue who planted the bug. St. John says it’s not one of his.”

“He’s right about that,” Blues said as he rolled the microphone in his palm. “Every low-life PI in town has a drawer full of these.”

“Sullivan’s funeral is at one o’clock today. The office will be closed. Find out if any more of these toys are lying around. Where are you playing tonight?”

“I’ve got a gig at The Landing.”

“I’ll see you there around nine.”

“Any suggestions if someone decides to skip the funeral to catch up on paperwork?”

“Anyone who’s there instead of the funeral will have more explaining to do than you. The elevator to our floors will be locked out and you’ll have to use our access code.” Mason handed Blues a slip of paper with a series of numbers on it. “Use that sequence on the elevator control panel. It’s the only way to get to our floors.”

“Why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?”

“I hate being the last to know what’s going on.”

“What about your partner who found the bug?”

“Sandra Connelly. We agreed not to say anything to anyone else.”

“But you didn’t tell her about me, did you?”

“No, and don’t start interrogating me. I’m being careful, just like you told me. See you tonight.”