Mason thanked her and hung up, imagining a wife who so missed her husband that she kept his name listed in the phone book fifteen years after his death. Equal parts devotion and denial, Mason guessed, the ache of Abby's departure simmering beneath his scar. He squeezed the phone, as if to force it to ring with Abby on the other end. She was too compulsive not to check her messages, too stubborn and angry not to ignore his.
Mason worked the phone into the late afternoon, leaving messages, crossing out numbers that didn't match, adding new names and numbers that might lead him to the jurors. He found George Tasker's brother who told him that George was dead, killed four years ago when someone accidentally shoved him off a crowded curb into the path of a bus, whoever it was disappearing in the confusion, never caught.
Miguel Bustillo's mother added her son's name to the list of deceased jurors, telling Mason her son had been shot in the face a year ago while parked at a truck stop, eating his dinner in the dark, the case still unsolved. Mason felt a jolt of his own when she said her son had been shot in the face. Sonni Efron had died the same way. He offered his condolences as Miguel's mother sobbed.
Mason couldn't confirm the fate of any of the other jurors, but he didn't like the trend. Two jurors killed in accidents that didn't sound like accidents. Two jurors shot in the face. Using a red marker, he wrote
The odds that a third of the jury would die violently were too stunning to contemplate. The chances that their deaths were not connected to their jury service defied Mason's rule against coincidence. The likelihood that Blues was right about the danger of the lawsuit stuck in Mason's throat, prompting another call to Mary Kowalczyk and another message left on her machine.
Taking a break, he straightened the papers on his desk, coming across the obituary for his parents. He read it again, this time aloud, giving voice to the short story of their lives, trying to draw these distant relatives closer to him. His voice quivered at the end when he read the names of the six pallbearers: Jake Weinstein, Michael Rips, Randy Allenbrand, Doug Solomon, Frank Roth, Jeff Sanders.
They were names he'd never heard before. How could that be, he asked himself. Pallbearers were chosen for their close relationship to the deceased. Yet he'd never heard nor seen their names in his entire life. How, he wondered, could Claire omit them from his upbringing? If they were so close to his parents, why didn't they take an interest in him? It was as if another door had opened into his past, and darkness was the only thing on the other side.
Mason wrote the names on a piece of paper, tacking it to the cork on the inside of the dry erase board door. He opened the phone book again, anxious to learn whether pallbearers had a better survival rate than jurors.
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?'
