by Joel Goldman
"Mary says you're the lawyer," the priest said.
Mason shook the priest's moist hand. "Lou Mason," he said.
"I've seen your name in the papers," Father Steve said, wiping his hand on his trousers. "Mary's been through quite a lot. I'm not certain she needs your kind of help just now. She needs to grieve for her son and move on. That's what I've told her."
"She believes her son was innocent," Mason said. "Some people can't move on until they know the truth."
"And you, Mr. Mason, you think you can find the truth for Mary?"
"I don't know, Father," Mason answered. "Sometimes the truth gets wrapped up in so many different versions it's hard to separate what people want to be true from what is true. But, maybe you can help me."
Father Steve folded his arms over his middle. "How so?" he asked.
"At Ryan's execution, you told Mary that Ryan had confessed to everything," Mason said. He held up one hand as Father Steve narrowed his eyes and tightened his jaw. "I know confessions are confidential and I wasn't eavesdropping. Everyone in the witness room heard what you said. It made them feel better, hearing a priest say that Ryan had confessed to murder. Is that why you told her that? So she would feel better about watching her son die. Or did he really confess to the murders?"
"A confession is a sacred trust, Mr. Mason. As is the counseling I give to my parishioners. Whatever you may have heard was not intended for your ears and I won't discuss it now."
"The reason I ask, Father," Mason said, "is that Mary didn't believe you. That's why she hired me. Which makes me wonder why a priest would lie about someone confessing to murder? I don't suppose you can help me out with that theological dilemma."
Father Steve tried to hold Mason's eyes, looking away instead as he fumbled in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He pulled one out, raised it to his mouth then crumpled it, flecks of paper and tobacco sticking to his palm.
Mason took advantage of the priest's discomfort. "Tough habit to kick, Father. Good for you."
"We all have our struggles, Mr. Mason."
Father Steve left him on the sidewalk. Mason watched as the priest wedged himself behind the wheel and shook another cigarette from the pack, a trail of smoke escaping from his window as he drove away.
***
Mary opened the door for Mason. A weak front of cool air greeted him. The house was dimly lit, shades drawn against the sun, a window air conditioner barely holding its own against the heat, cooling the front room of the house.
"I wasn't expecting so much company," Mary said.
"I should have called," Mason said.
"Oh, that's all right," Mary said, waving her hand. "I don't drive, so I don't get out a lot. Visitors are nice. I made some ice tea. Would you like a glass?"
"Sounds great," Mason said, following her into the kitchen.
A fan sat on the floor, blowing warm air across the room. A portrait of Jesus hung on the wall above a small table with two chairs and a plastic floral arrangement in the center of the table.
"It's cooler in the front room," Mary said, pouring them each a glass of tea, leading him back. "I don't have air-conditioning upstairs, so I've been sleeping on the sofa," she said. "I don't know how the poor people are getting through this heat."
Mary sat on the sofa, while Mason took in the room. The green carpet was worn thin. The walls were paneled to look like wood, the synthetic texture unmistakable. A large crucifix adorned one wall next to a framed high school photograph of Ryan, a shrine within a shrine.
A rectangular aquarium, the water bubbling, housed a handful of colorful striped fish. Mason bent to get a close look. A miniature deep-sea diver was suspended in the water, perfectly weighted to hold his position while the fish swam around him, detouring through a coral reef and a sunken ship half hidden by plastic plants.
"Ryan begged and begged for that aquarium. We finally got it for him when he was ten," Mary said. "I keep it up. I know it's foolish, but there are some things I can't let go of. They remind me of when things were right."
Mason sat in a chair across from the sofa, taking a drink of his tea. "Father Steve thinks you shouldn't have hired me."
"Father Steve has been my priest for thirty years. I know what he thinks," Mary said. "The man can be a comfort, but he's no port in a storm. You told me that Nick Byrnes brought you his file on Ryan's case. Have you looked at it? What do you think?"
She had a mercurial manner, shifting like quicksilver from a soft-spoken invitation for tea to a hard-edged dismissal of her weak-willed clergyman.
"I think there's enough evidence there for me to file a wrongful death case against Whitney King, which is what Nick wants me to do. I don't know if there's enough for me to prove that Ryan was innocent, which is what you want me to do."
"Did you come here to tell me that you're giving up on my case? Because if you are, I'll see this through by myself. My son is dead because of that King boy, just like that poor couple. I'll not rest until that's put right."
Mason shook his head, having no doubt that Mary would leave him behind. "No, I don't give up that easily. I need to know what isn't in that file. I need to know why you are so certain Ryan was innocent."
"You think it's because I'm his mother, don't you?"
"If that's not part of it, you wouldn't be his mother. You sat through the trial and heard all the evidence. There has to be more."
Mary drew circles in the moisture that gathered on her glass of iced tea, not looking up as she answered. "Ryan was a good boy. My husband and I raised him right. He was not capable of killing anyone," she said with a certainty that defied contradiction.
Mason put his glass down on the low table between the sofa and the chair. "Tell me about that night, Mary."
Mary shifted her vision to a middle distance, aiming at the past, not at Mason, speaking so softly Mason had to lean forward to hear.
"They were both on the basketball team at St. Mark's Academy, Ryan and Whitney. Best friends as far as Ryan was concerned. I never believed it. Kings and Kowalczyks don't mix. The Kings lived in a big fancy house. Society people. We were dirt to them. Whitney would come over here looking down his nose at our house. Ryan couldn't see it. Ryan didn't make friends real easily, so I didn't say anything to him. I just knew he'd be sorry if he ever had to count on a boy like that Whitney."
"Had there been any trouble between Ryan and Whitney before that night?" Mason asked.
"If there was, Ryan never said anything. As far as he was concerned, Whitney King hung the moon. Ryan was always talking about Whitney doing this, doing that. Like the boy was some kind of celebrity when all he was, was a snotty kid with a rich daddy."
"Was Whitney with Ryan when he came home that night?" Mason asked.
Mary shook her head, biting her lip. "I was in bed. I worked at Truman Medical Center then and had to go in at five in the morning. Vince, my husband, was working an out-of-town job. I didn't hear Ryan come home."
Mason knew all that, had read Mary's trial testimony, but wanted to hear her tell it, listening for anything that didn't fit. "The police came the next day?"
"Dinnertime," Mary said, her voice rising, her shoulders shivering. "They had a search warrant and they asked for Ryan. I said what's this all about. They wouldn't tell me. There were two detectives and some other officers in uniforms. They swarmed all over my house like locusts," she said, brushing her arms, wiping away the memory like a stain.
"Where was Ryan?" Mason asked.
"In his room. I called up to him. I told him the police were here and wanted to talk to him. He didn't answer. Detective Bluestone, that horrible man at your office, he went upstairs. I could hear Ryan screaming from the kitchen. I don't know what came over me, but I grabbed a butcher knife and ran upstairs, I was so scared. Another policeman grabbed me. They were going to arrest me too, but the other detective, Mr. Ryman, the one you were with at the execution, he made them let me go."
She held her arms tightly against her sides, elb
ows cocked. It was as if she could feel the cops hands on her again, keeping her from her son.
"Mary," Mason began. "Ryan's clothes were covered with blood from both of the Byrneses. The police found the boys' clothes hidden in your basement. I know the story both boys told. One of them has to be lying. I've got to have something more to go on. How can you be so certain Ryan was innocent?"
Mary looked at Mason, not a trace of doubt on her face. "He had no reason."
"What about Whitney King?" Mason asked. "What reason could he possibly have had?"
"The rich are different, Mr. Mason. They don't need a reason."
Mason looked around the drab room. Mary Kowalczyk, wearing a faded shift that had seen too many hot summers, sat rigidly against the tired cushions of the sofa she slept on. Jesus gazed down at them from his cross. The air conditioner wheezed as the room was shrinking. Mason understood at last. Mary Kowalczyk believed her son was innocent because she hated rich people.
Chapter 10
Mason picked Harry Ryman up in front of Union Station an hour later. He wanted to run through the facts of the case with Harry. Mason was troubled by the missing murder weapon. The prosecutor didn't need it to prove that the Byrneses had been murdered or that both boys had committed the crime. Mason needed it to prove that Ryan was innocent. Even after fifteen years, there could be fingerprints or DNA evidence that would prove who had swung the tire iron.
Mason had another problem that was also dependent on the murder weapon. He hoped that Harry would help him with this one even though he knew Harry had an arresting cop's bias.
There was no evidence of a struggle between the victims and the killers. If Ryan was innocent, Whitney King had managed to kill both victims before either could resist or flee. Whitney may have been a spoiled rich kid, but that didn't make him a ninja.
With his deteriorated eyesight, Harry didn't trust himself to drive outside Red Bridge, his neighborhood in south Kansas City. When he couldn't stand being cooped up any longer, he walked two blocks from his house and caught a bus that took him all the way downtown and into the River Market area along the Missouri River. He'd wander around the shops, grab lunch, sometimes taking a walk through River Front Park, catching a southbound bus back home, getting off if something else struck his fancy along the way. When Mason called his cell phone, Harry was sitting next to the fountain in front of Union Station.
Once the second largest passenger rail terminal in the country, Union Station had been abandoned, boarded up— an eyesore that was too big to be forgotten. Saved by the vote of people living on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas state line in favor of a tax to raise money for its restoration, the station had been returned to its glory days, once again delivering passengers to the center of the city. The station was on Twenty-fifth Street between Main and Broadway.
Just to the south high on a hill above Union Station, stood the Liberty Memorial, a towering obelisk honoring those who had died in World War I. It too had recently been restored.
Mason parked next to a granite pillar with a bronze plaque that commemorated the spot in the Union Station parking lot where Pretty Boy Floyd and his gang had gunned down four lawmen in an effort to free their friend Frank Nash, who was killed in the effort. It was Kansas City's answer to Chicago's St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Mason stopped to read the summary of the bloody business that had taken place on June 17, 1933. Nash had escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary nearly three years earlier where he was serving a twenty-five-year term for assaulting a mail custodian. Finally captured in Arkansas, two FBI agents and a local chief of police escorted Nash by train to Kansas City where he would be transferred back to the prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.
When the FBI agents and Nash got into their car, Floyd and his men opened fire on them and their police escort. Floyd escaped the botched rescue only to be killed in a shootout in Ohio in October 1934. Bloody as the massacre had been, the books had been balanced with the same red ink. At least, Mason thought, no one had second-guessed Floyd's fate. Looking up the hill at the Liberty Memorial, Mason was struck by the City's impulse to honor its dead when the cause was noble or the death dramatic. There would be no monument for Ryan Kowalczyk.
"Hot enough for you?" Mason asked Harry when he joined him at the fountain.
"I don't mind the heat," Harry answered. "Besides, the fountain helps. I'll bet it's ten degrees cooler next to that water."
The fountain was an array of high-powered jets, the sprays choreographed in a kaleidoscope of patterns that never seemed to repeat, sometimes set to music. Kansas City bragged about its fountains. They may be baking in a heat wave, but the city wouldn't let the fountains run dry.
"It's great that you can see it well enough to enjoy it," Mason said.
"Hell, I can't see the patterns worth a damn," Harry said. "About all I can see is when one spray starts and another stops. But, I can feel it, like the water vibrates around me. That's something."
"How about I give you a ride home?"
"Cheaper than the bus," Harry answered. "What are you up to besides running a taxi service?" he asked when they'd settled into Mason's car.
"Mary Kowalczyk and Nick Byrnes hired me. Mary wants me to get her son a pardon and Nick wants Whitney King's head on a pike outside the village gates."
"I know. Blues told me."
"You okay with that?" Mason asked. "I mean the part about proving Kowalczyk was innocent."
"None of my business," Harry said, looking out the passenger window, his left hand balled into a fist, drumming against his knee. "We all gotta eat, but you ought to find another way to pay for your groceries. Kowalczyk is dead. You can't un-ring that bell and I'm not losing any sleep over it. He was guilty. Plain and simple. You want to have your head handed to you, be my guest."
Mason drove, neither of them talking. Harry never said anything trite to Mason, like telling Mason he thought of him as a son, though he had treated him that way since Mason was a small boy, Harry's relationship with Claire dated back that many years. Harry took him to ball games, slipped him a few bucks for a date, and gave him a stern eye if his grades slipped. In recent years, he cut corners and pulled strings for Mason when he needed help from the police department.
Growing up, Mason had idolized Harry, making it tough for him to take Harry on, though he'd done it once before when Blues's life was on the line. Blues and Harry had been partners until Blues was forced from the police department. Harry had carried a grudge against Blues that was almost fatal when Mason was caught in the middle years later. Blues was the brother Mason never had. This time, Mason was taking both of them on. Long odds.
"Why do you think the jury acquitted Whitney King?" he finally asked Harry.
Harry shook his head. "The jury was deadlocked for two days. Then they split the baby. I've never been in a jury room, but that's one I'd have paid for admission. We had those boys dead to rights. Their alibis were bullshit. They both should've gotten the needle."
Mason sighed. "I've got a feeling Kowalczyk was innocent."
"A murder case isn't a prom date, Lou. Feelings got nothing to do with it. It's all about the evidence and the evidence in this case was overwhelming."
"There's something that bothers me about the facts," Mason said.
"What's that?" Harry asked.
"Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes were young and healthy. His parents testified that they ran marathons, worked out all the time."
"What's your point?"
"The murder weapon was never found. Everyone assumed that it was the tire iron from the Byrnes's car since it was missing. If that's true, the killers had to hit them one at a time."
"So what?" Harry asked.
"So, if the husband got it first, why didn't the wife run away? If the wife got it first, why didn't the husband put up a fight? If both boys were there when the murders took place, the one not swinging the tire iron would have had to hold the other victim down. There were would have been a struggle. O
ne of the boys would have ended up with bruises or cuts. One of the victims would have had the killer's skin under their fingernails. Something would have happened, but nothing did. It's like the victims stood still while they were killed."
Harry said, "The wife wouldn't have run and left her baby in the car. Who's to say there wasn't a fight? Besides, that doesn't prove one of those kids was telling the truth and it doesn't prove there was only one murder weapon. Could have been two and we didn't find either one of them."
"Maybe not," Mason said. "But it doesn't add up. If Ryan Kowalczyk was innocent, we need to know that."
"Why?" Harry asked. "So his mother can sue the state of Missouri and wooly some boo-hoo money out of the taxpayers? So you can prove that Blues and I caused an innocent kid to die? How's that gonna help anybody? Especially us?" Mason had no answers to Harry's questions. "Pull over," Harry said. "I'll take the bus the rest of the way home."
Chapter 11
Nancy Troy was a public defender, spending her days and nights fighting off a better staffed, better equipped, better financed foe. The State. She was handicapped by another small problem. Most of her clients were guilty and there were too many of them to keep track of, let alone do the exhaustive job of preparing a defense that Mason did for a client that could pay the freight.
She was a miniature bulldog, barely cresting five feet, carrying an extra fifteen pounds of midlife, sandy hair half gray, not vain enough to care. She snapped and snarled at cops and prosecutors, walking the tightrope in a system that balanced overcrowded criminal dockets with overcrowded prisons. Her definition of success was squeezing justice out of the process when she could. Ryan Kowalczyk had been one of her clients.
Her office was in a one-story brick building on the east side of downtown, across the street from what used to be the bus station, an empty building now on the city's list of things it didn't know what to do with. Nancy had been a public defender for twenty years, getting one of the few perks of her practice, a private office; the walls were covered with her kids' artwork and a handful of framed letters of thanks from grateful clients. She offered Mason a seat, closing the door behind him.