He hadn’t seen Jimmy Brand for thirty years. He didn’t need to do the math. He had the morning in his head like a photograph. The days they’d spent in the Trail’s End Motel and after their encounter, Mason had twisted in a way he thought would certainly kill him, and then Jimmy let him off with a hand on the side of his face, that touch, and saying, “Let us get over ourselves. It’s okay. It’s over. The year. My life here.” He had smiled. “And that band is over with. Mason, I have to leave. Ten reasons, and you are not among them. I will see you again.” It was a morning in June, and the birds were crazy in the trees, calling, and Mason retrieved the car, and Jimmy came out of the room with his duffel. They drove without a word to the Greyhound station, which was an anteroom on Front Street by the tracks, and the bus was there idling. It had come and gone all his life, and Mason had never seen the bus before. Jimmy got out of the car and leaned back to say, “Don’t be an idiot. You were kind to me. Don’t look back. I’ll see you.” He shut the car door and went into the bus. A minute later the bus door closed, and it eased onto Front Street headed east. Mason turned off the car and got out and stood and looked across the street at the Antlers, bright from its new coat of paint, but still a dive. Two men sat on the sidewalk against the facade of the building, rolled blankets in their laps. If they got up and crossed the street, they could sit in the sun. The town was a plain little place before him, his home, and it felt now empty and without one mystery of its own.
• • •
Now he moved down the sidewalk on Berry Street stiffly, new at this game. He’d walked at first. He’d beat the streets for two years when he first came to Denver. Every time he’d hear of a firm with an opening, he was there. It was an era of close calls but no callbacks. Everybody liked him, and everybody knew him, but by the time there was a bona fide position ready for him, his own business had taken off. He’d started alone, taking what he could, some corporate spillover from the big companies. An old associate, on hearing that Mason did wills, trusts, and divorces, sent him some work. He wrote deeds. Mason did DUI’s for friends of friends only. He made a lot of money in a wrongful death suit on behalf of a family run down in a movie line by a drunk driver. Then the year he was thirty a big case fell on his desk. Fourteen people had been injured in one of the city’s softball complexes when the aluminum seating failed. Two would never walk again, and a child had perished. They had had representation by a firm in his building that hurried the deal and started talking money at the initial strategy session. The plaintiffs were hurt and shocked. Mason literally met them in the elevator, the five people from the three families that were suing the city. It was an accident, but he knew who they were. His first words when they got into the car and he assessed their faces were “You want a glass of water?”
He didn’t say it was a ploy, but it was a ploy. They talked two hours that first day, and he learned to listen, to try to grasp the weight of the damage. It was as close to empathy as he could get, and he learned that it helped him know how to talk to them.
He moved the case slowly, as the plaintiffs wanted, and he went step by step. He never talked money with them, even when the city’s attorney tried again and again to cut a deal. Mason already knew what a life meant in a settlement, but the city attorney told him again anyway: $2.6 million. Mason told the woman that that wasn’t the issue. His clients wanted a trial. They wanted to tell what happened, be heard, be seen. Their lives were changed. By now Mason knew his life would be made of stories. And so it went to trial, and because Mason was methodical and quiet and obviously thorough and in no hurry, and because he used the three weeks in court to display and listen to the stories of all the victims, then the bleacher company, an aluminum girder expert, another engineer and a metallurgist, and the comptroller from the City of Denver budget department, the plaintiffs won the award of $41 million dollars. He got almost eight, the agreed percentage.
He moved the office to an old building downtown, which he bought, and took in two partners, one of them a woman he would marry some years later, Elizabeth. His evolution was begun. The case made him a hotshot but a strange one. He was respected, but he had few friends. He hired two serious attorneys. Kirby, Rothman, and Phelps began to turn work away.