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.
She was seated when Mason arrived for lunch, her heavy winter coat draped across an empty chair. It was dark olive, impervious to nature's elements, and looked as if it were designed for a Prussian Cossack, a sharp contrast to his navy pinstripe suit, white shirt, and red-and-navy-striped tie.
'You look like you're dressed for a job interview,' she told him as he sat down.
'Interview, not job interview. 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.'
'When God said let there be light, he didn't mean Billy Sunshine.'
'Not one of your favorite politicians?'
'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.'
'To the contrary. 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 and fix the potholes on every street, 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?'
'Don't be cute. 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 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. I figured you wanted to talk about Jack Cullan's murder, not local politics.'
'Good for you. No beating around the bush.'
Their server interrupted them with a laconic rendition of the daily specials. They ordered the lentil soup.
'I talked to Harry. We'll do our jobs, and whatever happens, happens. It'll work out.'
'Don't kid yourself. 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, so there's not much that's likely to work out.'
'What do you want me to do? Walk away? Let somebody else defend Blues?'
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 watched 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 server deposited their soup, steam rising from the bowl mixing with the tears brimming in Claire's eyes. She turned away, red eyed and red faced.
'Damn the work we do!' she said, shoving the bowl away from her. She stood, grabbed her coat, and left without another word.
Mason let her 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 Street 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. 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 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 thinking 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 tarpaper shanty built into the side of a bridge abutment. A man and a woman 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 asked her. 'Because we don't live under a bridge?'
'Partly. 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
