Read Online Lou Mason Mystery - 02 - The Last Witness by Joel Goldman - Free Book Online Page B

and me got them outnumbered.”
    Mason smiled at the vote of confidence. “This case is hot and it’s going to get hotter. You watch yourself in there.”
    Blues chuckled. “Man, you forget one thing. All those brothers and white-trash crackers in there are afraid this crazy Indian will scalp ‘em in their sleep. No one is going to fuck with me. Not more than once.”
    “Be cool, Blues. The case they’ve got against you isn’t worth a shit. Don’t give them one they can make.”
    “I hear that.”
    They touched their fists against the glass again, and Mason pushed a button signaling the guard that they had finished their meeting.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
     
    When Mason got back to his office, he listened to a message from his aunt Claire telling him to meet her for lunch at the Summit Street Cafe at noon. It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. She wasn’t much for protocol.
    Mason assumed that she wanted to talk about Blues’s case. If he was caught in the middle between Harry and Blues, she was caught between him and Harry. Though she wouldn’t see it that way. She was one of the few people Mason knew who meant it when she said, “Let the chips fall where they may.”
    He had time until lunch so he searched the Kansas City Star ‘s Web site for Rachel Firestone’s articles about Jack Cullan’s murder, noting that there had been three other murders during the same span, none of them getting the same coverage and none of them generating any fanfare or outrage. Mason knew why.
    Kansas City knows murder. Any town that began as a river trading post called Old Possum Trot knows killing. Any town that claims Jesse James as a wayward son and commemorates the Union Station Massacre knows how to let the lead fly. Any town that has convulsed with riots and raised a generation of hopeless hard cases who expect to die before they’re twenty-five knows the sweet agony of death.
    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