Read Online Trophy Widow by Michael A. Kahn - Free Book Online

the Oasis Shelter to his smarmy male chauvinism to the way he wielded the instruments of power as if he’d actually earned them. Absent Orion Sampson, Nate would be a nobody—a fact that only underscored his own hypocrisy, and vulnerability. The congressman lived by the fundamentalist tenets of his church. According to one joke, he and his wife never had sex standing up because someone might think they were dancing. Swearing, drinking, and fornication were also on Sampson’s forbidden list. The consequences of violating that list were wondrous to behold. Seven years ago, Sampson’s eldest son, Orion junior, was a state representative, a vice president of a black-owned bank in his father’s district, and the heir apparent to his father’s congressional seat. Then he got sued by an exotic dancer who claimed that he’d fathered her child. When blood tests confirmed paternity, the congressman responded with Old Testament vengeance. These days, Orion junior sells used cars in north St. Louis.
    Fortunately for Nate, his uncle was rarely in town and never frequented Nate’s favorite nightspots. According to those in the know, Nate had taken one additional precautionary step—he’d procured a “fiancée” in the form of a churchgoing schoolteacher in her early thirties named Beatrice who accompanied Nate to all family gatherings. Uncle Orion was apparently quite taken with the demure Beatrice and never passed up the opportunity to urge his nephew to finally set the wedding date.
    Out in the hallway near the elevators, I conferred briefly with Sheila. She was heading back to the shelter, but I had another meeting in the building to try to straighten out a permit problem for a client.
    â€œPut me on the agenda for the next board meeting,” I told her. “I can tell them our options.”
    â€œDo we have any?” she asked bleakly.
    â€œAbsolutely, Sheila. We have more leverage than you realize. Remember, Nate’s goal is to get this situation resolved quickly. He’s in there right now telling Borghoff to light a fire under the city’s lawyers. He’ll want them cranking out condemnation papers. The more we slow it down, the more the balance shifts in our favor.”
    â€œBut how much can we really slow it down?”
    â€œYou might be surprised.”
    ***
    My other meeting at City Hall lasted just thirty minutes. Afterward, I wandered slowly through the rotunda toward the exit, thinking over Angela’s situation. A large plaque on the wall caught my attention. According to the engraved text, it was placed there in memory of “the Distinguished Citizens of Greater St. Louis who perished in the Great Glider Crash at Lambert Field, August 1, 1943.” The list of dead included the mayor and nine other Distinguished Citizens.
    The Great Glider Crash of 1943 ?
    Here I was, a little over a half century later, with absolutely no idea what the plaque memorialized. I’d never heard of the Great Glider Crash of 1943 and didn’t recognize any of the names of the Distinguished Citizens—not even the mayor.
    There’s a lesson there, I told myself. Fifty years from now, the memories of Angela Green’s murder trial would be just as faint. After all, hadn’t other “trials of the century” faded long before the century had? Who today could even recognize the names Bruno Hauptmann and Alfred de Marigny, much less recall the details of their respective murder trials, each of which mesmerized the nation while dominating the front pages for months? Were you to suggest to someone of Bruno Hauptmann’s era that there would come a time in America when the typical citizen could not recite the age, sex, or first name of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby or the place where the infant’s corpse was found, he would laugh in disbelief. Or that Sacco and Vanzetti, the most famous pair of criminal defendants of the first half of the