Deadlocked (13 page)

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.

Chapter 17

Mason hit the street. Waves of heat radiated off the sunbaked pavement, humidity rising in his path like a city swamp. He waded through it to his car parked around the corner a block away, his shirt sticking to his back like a poultice.

Three young black kids, barefoot, wearing shorts, no shirts, struggled with the plug on a fire hydrant, tiptoeing on the searing curb. An elderly black woman sat on her wooden stoop wearing a sun-faded flowered shift, begging shade from a bent tree. She fanned herself, watching the kids, a dog flat out on the brown grass next to her. The chrome doorhandle on his car sizzled, the leather steering wheel too hot to hold, air inside the car stiff. Mason was oblivious to the kids and the woman who stared at him as he passed.

He jerked the key in the ignition and banged on the gas. The car jumped out from the curb, windows down, hot air escaping as the air conditioner played catch-up. Heading east on Linwood toward Mary Kowalczyk's neighborhood, he tried to make sense of Claire's silence, deciding that Nick Byrnes had been right. Claire was trying to protect him from something.

Nick's parents had been murdered, the story of a car accident a thin cover for the brutal truth. There was no doubt Mason's parents had been killed when their car left the road. Was that it, then? Was his parents' accident not an accident at all? Did the person who left the rock on his parents' headstone do so out of guilt? Mason wouldn't let the questions go unanswered.

He called Mary again as he drove, hanging up on her answering machine, uneasy that she'd been gone all day. For a woman who, by her own admission, had few places to go, she'd been gone a long time. Mason pulled up in front of her house just as the temperature inside his car was approaching the no sweat zone.

Taking the steps two a time, he found no signs that Mary was at home. The curtains were drawn as they had been on his last visit. The house was silent, no footsteps answering when he rang the bell and rapped hard against the door. Her mailbox was mounted next to the door, the day's slim offerings still there—a catalog, an electric bill, and a sweepstakes offer.

Mason jiggled the doorknob but a deadlock bolt held it firm. Leaning into the picture window on the front of the house, he couldn't find a seam in the curtain to see inside. He dialed Mary's number again from his cell phone but her recorded voice repeated the instructions to leave a message.

He circled around to the back of the house where the gate on the chain link fence hung open on rusted hinges. A worn path led to a small screened-in porch, its door unlocked, the fine mesh black screen giving Mason cover as he tried the back door to the house, giving it his shoulder, the door yelping as the weak lock surrendered. Stepping into the kitchen, he called her name, softly at first, then loud. No one answered, the house was deaf.

He'd feel like a fool if she suddenly came home, trying to explain that he'd broken and entered because he was afraid that Whitney King might do her harm. He'd feel worse than a fool if he found her stuffed in a closet, his fears too real, his timing too late.

The house was small, the first floor cool, the second steamy, as she had said. The basement was dank and musty, the floor an unfinished slab, no signs of a freshly dug grave. Mason made fun of himself at the thought. The whole place was empty. It was clean and tidy, her clothes in closets and drawers. Her suitcase was under the bed and food for a week was in the refrigerator. It was the way she would have left everything if she was coming back.

Mason didn't know what else to do, so he sat in her front room and waited, searching the closets again when he got impatient, listening to her answering machine, his message the only one. He checked his voice mail for a message from Mary. Finding none, he paced in the small house until the sun retreated, then drew back the curtains and watched the street. An occasional car passed by; the street was quiet. The night wore on as Mason sat in the front room, kept company by the fish in the aquarium.

He turned off the lights and sat in the dark, thin illumination leaking in from the street. His eyes adjusted to the interior dusk, shapes and shadows visible in silhouette. He imagined Mary sleeping on the couch in the only cool room in the house, wondering how the poor people got by.

He thought about what she had done for Ryan. How she had given him life, then tried to save it and, when she couldn't, insisted on saving his memory. He thought about Elizabeth Byrnes and how she had saved Nick's life by covering him with a quilt and how he had honored his parents' memory by demanding justice for them. Last, he thought about his parents and their violent deaths. He had accepted their fate, demanding nothing, not even the truth. When he measured himself against Mary Kowalcyk and Nick Byrnes, he came up short.

The night passed as he took inventory of his life and those of his clients. The darkness didn't conceal a thing.

He held Mary's phone in his lap. It didn't ring. No one knocked at the door. She lived by herself. People left her alone. She was gone and no one would miss her. Except for him.

Chapter 18

It was one-fifteen on Friday morning when Mason woke Samantha Greer, rousting her out of bed. Samantha peered through the peephole of her front door, opening up, hair tousled, lips tight. She stood in her entry hall, keeping Mason outside, a purple tank top barely covering her panties, a pistol in one hand, close against her thigh.

"Who died?" she asked. "And it better be someone important, like the president."

Mason stared at her without meaning to; her breasts were escaping from her top, one ankle locked behind the other, her gun hand up on her hip, the other hand cocked against the door frame. Samantha caught his look, covering up with her arms, squaring her legs as Mason glanced away.

"Sam," a male voice called from upstairs. "What's going on? Who's there?"

"Nothing and nobody. Go back to sleep, Phil," she said over her shoulder, leaving the gun on a table in the hall, joining Mason outside as she pulled the door closed behind her.

Samantha lived in a neighborhood north of the Missouri River. The river came down to Kansas City from Omaha, bending east toward St. Louis. The Kansas River cut across the plains, pouring into the Missouri at the river's bend. The two rivers were geographic quirks that divided the region into thirds. One-third was Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas City south of the Missouri, together with the suburbs of Johnson County, Kansas, made up the second slice. The part of the city north of the Missouri, called the Northland, was the last piece. In a tribute to tribalism, each region looked down on the other like a stepchild.

Samantha's subdivision was off of North Sixty-fourth Street, middle-class split levels and ranches. Not the kind of neighborhood where women hung out on their front steps in the wee hours, dressed only in their underwear, with or without guns.

"Thanks," he said.

"For what? Calling you a nobody?" she asked.

"No. For not shooting me. This is important."

"I'm listening," she said.

Mason explained, "I've got a missing client."

"And I've got office hours," she answered, turning around.

"Don't, Sam. Not so fast," he said, his hand on her arm. "Hear me out."

Samantha looked at him, shaking her head. "Okay.
Reader's Digest
version." Mason told her about Mary Kowalczyk. Samantha shook her head again, drawing figure eights with her toe.

"Your client give you a key to her house?" she asked Mason.

"Not exactly," he answered.

"This isn't a commercial for Hertz, counselor. Representing someone gives you permission to overcharge, not break and enter."