The last witness lm-2

by Joel Goldman

  Put a million and a half people-white, black, brown, yellow, rich, poor, faithful, faithless, doped, dependent, and demanding-in the rolling river country of the heart of America and they'll find endless ways to kill. Put it in the papers and on the news with candlelight vigils for the funerals of infants. Watch as TV reporters stick microphones in mourners' faces asking how does it feel and the people will search themselves for shock while keeping a head count, a steady drumbeat of death, ahead or behind last year's pace.

  But take the life of a mover and a shaker, of one to whom it's not supposed to happen, someone who holds all the cards, someone who gives more dispensations than the pope and holds more markers than the devil. Well, that's showbiz. The mayor grieves the victim and denounces the guilty. The chief of police reassures an anxious community with a quick arrest, and the prosecuting attorney promises justice swift and certain.

  Rachel Firestone reported it all. Her prose was concise, her tone neutral, and her facts straight. Only the headlines above the stories announced an agenda. They painted the crime, the victim, the accused, and the supporting cast with a broad brush dipped in sensational ink to capture mind share and market share in a media-saturated world. Kingpin Murdered, screamed the headline in Tuesday's paper. Wednesday's lead promised Police Close to Arrest, and Thursday's paper trumpeted Ex-Cop Arrested for Murder of Political Boss.

  None of the stories added to Mason's knowledge of the case. He ran a search for articles on the Dream Casino, printed them, and began reading.

  Missouri had been a late entrant in the sweepstakes for gambling dollars. Bible Belt morality had kept the casino interests out of the state for decades, though Kansas City had been a wide-open town from the beginning of the twentieth century through Prohibition. Gambling had flourished in speakeasies all over town, particularly along the Twelfth Street strip from Broadway to city hall. Tom Pendergast had been the boss in those years, running his empire of influence and muscle under the guise of a concrete business.

  A coalition of clergy, political reformers, and the IRS had brought Pendergast down, and Kansas City settled into a long period struggling with its lingering reputation as a cow town, unable to compete with the temptations offered on a grander scale by bigger cities.

  The gaming people had seen opportunity on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. They sold the state legislature on a scam that would have shamed even Professor Harold Hill with its Music Man audacity.

  They promised gambling on riverboats reminiscent of Mark Twain's paddleboats; two-hour cruises with five-hundred-dollar loss limits to ensure that no one would lose the rent money. To prove they were good citizens, they offered to fund programs for problem gamblers and suggested that their tax revenue be dedicated to education. The legislature doubled down and took the bet, offering the voters an amendment to the state's constitution legalizing riverboat gambling on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. The voters couldn't wait to cash in.

  The first boat in the Kansas City area came to an unincorporated area north of the city. To the surprise of everyone but its owners, the Army Corps of Engineers ordered that the boat remain docked because of the hazards of navigating the Missouri River. With a sigh of regret heard all the way to their banks, the other casinos built their facilities on huge barges, digging moats around them that were fed by rivers to meet the legal requirement that the casinos be riverboats.

  The legislative scheme was complex, having been drafted by lawyers with help from the casinos' lobbyists. Like any successful partnership between regulators and those they regulate, the law appeared tough but was actually more malleable than a politician's oath to do what's right.

  The Missouri Gaming Commission was established to oversee and regulate all gaming activity. Each city retained the right to issue licenses to casino operators, subject only to the gaming commission's approval of the qualifications of the owners. Rules prohibiting ownership by convicted felons and other unsavory individuals were window dressing to distract attention from the real horse-trading that accompanied the grant of licenses.

  The competition for Kansas City's license had been fierce. Four casino operators had expressed interest in obtaining a license from the city. Each put together their own team of local supporters and business partners that had as its singular purpose getting the mayor's blessing. Some had been subtler than others, giving ownership interests to black and Hispanic businessmen who carried a message of diversity and economic opportunity to the mayor. Others offered sizable campaign contributions to the mayor and city councilmen.

  Mayor Sunshine announced the appointment of a blue ribbon commission to recommend which of the contenders should receive the sole license Kansas City intended to grant. It was the mayor's way of remaining above the fray and gave him plausible deniability of any effort to influence his decision.

  Of equal importance to the selection of the casino operator had been the selection of the site for the casino. Kansas City's river frontage afforded several possible locations, each of them privately owned. The owners of those sites joined in the free-for-all, anguishing over whether to choose between aligning with a particular casino operator and waiting to see if their site was selected. The wrong move could cost them millions.

  When all the coalitions and alliances were formed, when all the political contributions were deposited, and when all the promises that would be broken were made, the blue ribbon commission recommended to the mayor that he grant the license to Galaxy Gaming Co.

  Galaxy was a publicly traded company with casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and three other states that had approved riverboat gambling. Galaxy formed a joint venture with three prominent black businessmen and two labor unions whose local presidents were Hispanic. It pledged $250,000 to the Kansas City chapter of Gamblers Anonymous. Galaxy signed a ninety-nine-year ground lease, contingent on getting the license, with the owner of the site the Army Corps of Engineers had designated as its first choice for a 150,000-square-foot floating barge. Three city councilmen and Congressman Delray Shays backed the Galaxy proposal.

  The mayor thanked the commission members for their efforts, praised their hard work, and then bestowed the license on Ed Fiora and the Dream Casino. He announced that the casino would be docked at the limestone ledge that had once attracted eighteenth-century traders and trappers to pull in and build the trading post that grew into Kansas City. That site, he noted, was owned by the city and would be leased to the Dream Casino, turning an unproductive historical footnote into a new source of revenue for the city.

  The owners of the losing casinos had shrugged their corporate shoulders, accustomed to the game of chance they played in cities throughout the country. A few local investors in the losing companies cried foul, more aggrieved by the loss of the money they were convinced they would have made than by any misplaced sense of civic outrage. In time, they had let the matter drop and gone in search of the next good deal.

  Rachel Firestone didn't let the story drop. She dogged the Missouri Gaming Commission, the mayor's office, and the Dream Casino until she found the one thing that tied them all together. Jack Cullan. Cullan had represented Ed Fiora and led the behind-the-scenes efforts to win approval of the Dream's application. Before that, he had been treasurer of Billy Sunshine's two successful campaigns for the office of mayor.

  Though she hadn't found evidence of a direct relationship between Cullan and Beth Harrell, she cited highly placed confidential sources intimating that Harrell had been improperly influenced in her decision to approve the license for the Dream Casino.

  She traced the flow of money from Ed Fiora to Billy Sunshine. Though her most recent article intimated at a quid pro quo, she fell short of an outright accusation. She quoted the U.S. attorney as not finding sufficient evidence to take the case to the grand jury, making it sound as if he was part of the cover-up.

  Trying to find a connection between Cullan's murder and the Dream Casino reminded Mason of a game of three-card monte. The game was a con, not a game o
f chance or skill.

  The dealer dealt three cards, one of which was the ace of spades. The dealer then turned the cards facedown, and the gambler bet that he could keep track of the ace as the dealer shuffled the three cards at lightning speed. When the dealer finished shuffling, the gambler pointed to the card he believed was the ace. If the dealer wanted the gambler to win a small pot and keep playing until he lost a big one, the dealer would let the gambler win. The trick was to distract the gambler while the cards were being shuffled so that the dealer could replace the ace with another card, hiding the ace in his clothes.

  The dealer worked with a partner who bumped the gambler, offered him a drink, or otherwise pulled his attention away from the dealer just for an instant. Mason looked at the notes on his board, the newspaper stories, and the police report. He wondered who was hiding the ace of spades and who was trying to keep him from finding it.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  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.

  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 publi
c 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 triple. Do something with your life that makes a difference for someone beside yourself. Otherwise, you'll never score. You'll just die on third base."