The Last Witness

Chapter Nine

The Summit Street Cafe sits at the top of a hill at the intersection of Sixteenth and Summit. When it first opened, it was a vegetarian restaurant whose owner grew her vegetables in a large garden planted in a rocky vacant lot across the street. The restaurant's current owner had added meat to the menu and paved the garden for customer parking. The wood-plank floor was original equipment in the seventy-year-old brownstone that had housed, at various times, a brewery, a pharmacy, a free health clinic, and a tortilla plant. Summit Street was a ski slope that dropped from its peak at Fourteenth Street south to Southwest Boulevard, where it bottomed out in the heart of the predominately Hispanic West Side.

Claire Mason had practiced law by herself for thirty years, waging battles for those who had no one else to fight for them. Whether her battles were hopeless or hopeful, she won enough of them to keep going. Many of the bedrock businesses and institutions in town had been her target at one time or another. One of her favorite tactics was to buy a single share of stock in a company just so she could attend the shareholders' annual meeting. During the question-and-answer session, she would ask the CEO if he preferred that she just file a class-action lawsuit against the company since he was obviously too busy to return her phone calls. One CEO warned her against threatening him, and took her by the arm in a futile attempt to throw her out of the meeting. She responded by serving him with the lawsuit on the spot.

She was already seated at a round, wrought-iron table draped in a red-and-white-checked cloth when Mason arrived a few minutes before noon. The table and chairs were patio furniture that had been recycled as restaurant furnishings. A series of six large paintings of a nude woman plummeting into a black abyss hung on the wall behind Mason. Each one captured a different frame of her descent. Her raven hair flared around her head like a fan, while her arms and legs were splayed akimbo in the imaginary breeze of her descent. Her bemused expression contrasted sharply with the inescapably fatal course she was on. The artist's name and the price of each painting was written in swirling calligraphy on white cards mounted next to each frame.

Claire had draped her heavy winter coat across an empty chair. It was dark olive, impervious to nature's elements, and by Mason's estimation, weighed at least twenty-five pounds. Or so it had seemed to him when he'd carried it for her as a boy. His aunt didn't throw away anything that worked well, and her winter coat was tireless. It helped that she was oblivious of fashion, since the coat looked as if it were designed for a Prussian Cossack. She was wearing a dark brown pantsuit that was equally utilitarian.

Mason's own sense of fashion hovered in a casual comfort zone. He had three dark suits for court, but preferred jeans or khakis. He'd reluctantly dressed for success that morning, choosing a navy pinstripe suit, white shirt, and red-and-navy-striped tie. The mayor was speaking at a fund-raising lunch for the Salvation Army's Holiday fund drive at the Hyatt Hotel in Crown Center. Mason planned on stopping there after his lunch with Claire, and hoped his suit would help him get close enough to the mayor to ask some questions.

"You look like you're dressed for a job interview," she told him as he sat down.

"Interview, not job interview," he told her. "If I get the chance. I need to talk to the mayor about Jack Cullan. His staff won't work me into his schedule, so I'm going to work him into mine. He's giving a speech at the Hyatt. I'm going to try and catch him after he's done."

"When God said let there be light, He didn't mean Billy Sunshine," Claire said.

"Not one of your favorite politicians?" Mason asked her.

"Favorite politician is an oxymoron. Billy Sunshine has the distinction of being both an oxymoron and a regular moron."

"I take it you didn't vote for him," Mason said.

"To the contrary," Claire answered. "The politicians that disappoint me the most are the ones I vote for. I always feel like a sucker afterward. Billy Sunshine was smart, charismatic, and wanted to do all the right things for the right reasons. Revitalize downtown, pump private investment into the East Side, fix the potholes on every street and not just the mayor's. He wanted to unite the people who lived north of the river with the people who lived south of Seventy-Fifth Street, neither of whom believed they lived in the same city. He wanted the Hispanics on the West Side to have a bigger role in city government since they were the fastest-growing minority in the city. He wanted to pull the public schools out of the black hole the school board had thrown them into."

"And you're disappointed he didn't do all. of that?" Mason asked.

"Don't be cute," she told him with a smile that appreciated his sarcasm. "Half that stuff is impossible and the rest is just too hard for mere mortals. That's not the point. He made the promises, got the job, and sold out quicker than a whore on Saturday night."

"Sold out to whom?"

"Anybody with the price of a vote or a sweetheart deal or a zoning variance or whatever else a big campaign contributor was shopping for."

"Are you saying he took bribes?"

"Maybe. Probably not cash in a brown paper bag. It's usually not done that way. It's more often money that gets funneled to friends or family who get hired by somebody as a favor to somebody who wants a favor. That kind of thing. The mayor ends up with friends who owe him favors and pay him back with big campaign contributions or hidden interests in deals."

"How do you know all this and why isn't it on the front page of the newspaper?"

"I know it because I represent the people who get screwed in these deals. The business owner whose building gets condemned for some new high-rise, or the schoolchildren who can't read by the time they're in the eighth grade but are smart enough to figure out how to shoplift, sell dope, and get knocked up. And it's not in the newspaper because everyone knows it and no one can prove it."

"Rachel Firestone thinks she can, at least on the Dream Casino."

Claire studied Mason over her half glasses. "Since you're short on time, get the lentil soup. They serve it in a bread bowl. It's perfect for a cold day. You probably skipped breakfast, so you need something hearty."

Mason smiled at his aunt, surprised that she had dodged the subject of the Dream Casino. She had never pretended to replace his mother after her death, though she loved him as well as any parent could have and still worried about him.

"I know you didn't invite me to lunch to make sure I'm eating right," Mason told her. "I figured you wanted to talk about Jack Cullan's murder, not local politics."

"Good for you. No beating around the bush," she answered. "Solo practice doesn't leave much time for small talk."

Before Mason could respond, their waitress interrupted with a laconic rendition of the daily specials. She was a lanky white woman, barely out of her teens, whose spiked, violet hair failed to distract from the matching tattoos of elongated suns that ran the length of her arms. Both Claire and Mason ordered the lentil soup. The waitress sniffed the air, gave them a squinty, disdainful look, and scratched their order onto her pad. With a shake of her head, she slowly wandered off as if she'd seen enough and wasn't likely to return.

Mason said, "Harry and I already talked about it. We'll do our jobs and whatever happens, happens. It'll work out."

"Don't kid yourself," she told him. "There's not much chance this is going to work out. At least not for us. One of you, or both of you, will end up bloodied by the other. Blues may end up in prison for the rest of his life. Or worse," she added in a soft voice he had rarely heard from her. "No, there's not much that's likely to work out."

"So what do you want me to do? Walk away? Let somebody else defend Blues?" Mason asked her.

She glared at him as if he'd forgotten everything she'd ever taught him. "Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes they can't. Sometimes those are the things that have to be done no matter what. You'll live with it and move on, but you won't quit. Don't talk to me about the case. Don't apologize or rationalize to me or to yourself about what you have to do. Just do the best damn job."

Mason didn't have an answer, though he had questions. He wanted to ask Claire about Jack Cullan since she must have crossed paths with him more than once. He wanted to ask her if Harry was capable of pushing a bogus case against Blues just to even a score. More than anything, he wanted to ask her what had really happened between Harry and Blues. Instead, he studied her as she pretended to study the paintings on the wall behind him. His aunt never minded silence, believing it preferable to boring conversation. This silence was uneasy.

The waitress returned, depositing their soup in front of them. Mason watched the steam rise from the bowl in front of his aunt and mix with the tears brimming in her eyes. She turned away, red-eyed and red-faced.

"Damn the work we do!" Claire said, shoving the bowl away from her. She stood, grabbed her coat, and left without another word. The waitress gave Mason a withering look that said she blamed him and not the soup. Mason shrugged in reply.

Mason let Claire go, knowing better than to follow or argue. He ate his soup while he thought about her rendition of Billy Sunshine's promises for a diverse city. The Summit Cafe was on the West Side, the urban West Side, barely south of downtown and slightly west of the revitalized Freight House District where art galleries, coffee shops, and lofts converted to condos were in vogue. West Side meant Mexican restaurants and bakeries and neighborhoods where extended Hispanic families lived in row houses lining an entire block.

Kansas City was dotted with ethnic pockets like the West Side. Decades earlier, Italian immigrants had settled in the North End between the Missouri River and Admiral Boulevard. Though later generations had moved south to the suburbs, enough had stayed to preserve the identity of the area.

The East Side was called the urban core, code words meaning where the black people lived. It had the highest crime rate, the highest unemployment rate, and the worst schools. It was the recipient of the most lip service, campaign promises, and hand-wringing at City Hall.

Midtown was a rough square bounded on the north by the Plaza at Forty-Seventh Street, on the east by Holmes Road, on the south by Seventy-Fifth Street, and on the west by State Line Road, the divider between Missouri and Kansas. It was home to the city's power elite. Private schools made the dismal public schools irrelevant. Homes in Sunset Hills above the Plaza, where Cullan had lived, and along Ward Parkway fetched seven figures. Fashionably fit white men and women jogged along Ward Parkway, comfortable in the belief that their lives were the ones the city was referring to when it claimed to be the most livable city in America.

His aunt Claire's house, the house Mason had grown up in and later received as a wedding gift from her, was located in the heart of Midtown between Ward Parkway and Wornall Road, two blocks south of Loose Park. Claire had made it one of her missions in life to expose Mason to the entire city lest he grow up dunking that everyone was white and drove a Land Rover. Though they were Jewish, she had taken him to a black Methodist congregation, telling him that no one had the best corner of religious real estate. She took him to the City Union Mission to serve Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless, and then took him on a driving tour of the city's underbelly, where they found those who wouldn't come to the mission and gave them blankets and box dinners.

"You're damn lucky, that's all," she told him after they'd completed their deliveries one particularly cold Thanksgiving when he was ten years old. It had rained all day, the kind of cold, relentless rain that erodes any trace of warmth hidden in the body. Their last stop had been a tar-paper shanty built into the side of a bridge abutment. A man and a woman had lived there, although it was difficult to tell which was which. They both had greasy brown hair plastered to their heads with dirt and rain that had blown into their makeshift shelter. Their eyes were hollow, their cheeks splotched with broken blood vessels, and the few teeth they still had were yellow and rotted.

"Why?" Mason had asked her. "Because we don't live under a bridge?"

"Partly," she had answered. "Mostly because you're an upper-middle-class white male and this country doesn't like anything better than that. Just don't confuse luck with brilliance. Don't think because you were born on third base that you hit a triple. Do something with your life that makes a difference for someone besides yourself. Otherwise, you'll never score. You'll just die on third base."

Mason had envied his aunt for the passion that coursed through her to do the right thing, fight the good fight. He had looked for the same spark in his own practice, first in a small firm that represented injured people, then in a big firm that protected people's money, and now in his own practice, where he just protected people. He'd found the spark. Now he just hoped it wouldn't start a fire that consumed everyone he cared about.