The last witness lm-2 Read online

  The last witness

  ( Lou Mason - 2 )

  Joel Goldman

  Joel Goldman

  The last witness

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jack Cullan's maid found his body lying facedown on the floor of his study, his cheek glued to the carpet with his own frozen, congealed blood. When she turned the body over, fibers stuck to Cullan's cheek like fungus that grows under a rock. His left eye was open, the shock of his death still registered in the wide aperture of his eyelid. His right eye was gone, pulverized by a. 38-caliber bullet that had pierced his pupil and rattled around in his brain like loose change in the seconds before he died.

  "Shit," Harry Ryman said as he looked down on the body of the mayor's personal lawyer. "Call the chief," he told his partner, Carl Zimmerman.

  Harry knew that Jack Cullan wasn't just Mayor Billy Sunshine's lawyer. He was a social lubricator, a lawyer who spent more time collecting IOUs than a leg-breaking bagman for the mob. For the last twenty years, getting elected in Kansas City had meant getting Cullan's support. Anyone doing serious business with the city had hired him to get their deals done.

  Harry guessed that Cullan was in his early sixties, dumpy from years spent avoiding physical exertion in favor of mental manipulation. Harry squatted down to examine Cullan's hands. They were smooth, unlike the man's reputation. Cullan had a Santa Claus build, but Harry knew the man couldn't have played St. Nick without asking for more than he ever would have given.

  Harry had been a homicide detective too long to remember ever having been anything else. He knew that the chances of solving a murder dropped like the wind chill after the first forty-eight hours. If time weren't a powerful enough incentive, a politically heavy body like Jack Cullan's would push his investigation into warp speed.

  He gathered his topcoat around him, fighting off the cold that had invaded the study on the back side of Cullan's house. The windows were open. The maid, Norma Hawkins, said she had found them that way when she arrived for work at eight o'clock that morning, Monday, December 10. The heat had also been turned off, the maid had added. An early winter blast had locked Kansas City down in a brutal snow-laced assault for the last week. Cullan's house felt like ground zero.

  "The chief says to meet him at the mayor's office," Zimmerman said, interrupting Harry's silent survey of the murder scene.

  "What for?" Harry asked, annoyed at anything that would slow down the investigation.

  "I told the chief that somebody popped the mayor's lawyer. He told me to sit tight, like I was going someplace, right? He calls back two minutes later and says meet him at the mayor's office. You want to discuss it with the chief, you got his number."

  Carl Zimmerman had grown up fighting, sometimes over jabs about being a black man with a white man's name, sometimes to find out who could take a punch. He and Harry had been partners for six years without becoming close friends. Harry was older, more experienced, and automatically assumed the lead in their investigations, a batting order he knew that Zimmerman resented. That was Zimmerman's problem, Harry had decided. Zimmerman was a good cop, but Harry was a better one.

  Harry wanted to get moving. He wanted to interview the maid, figure out how long Cullan had been dead before she found him, and backtrack Cullan's activities in the hours before he was murdered. He wanted to talk to everyone Cullan had been with during that time. He wanted to search Cullan's home, car, and office for anything that might lead him to the killer. The last thing he wanted to do was run downtown to promise the chief and the mayor that they would solve the crime before dinner. The next-to-last thing he wanted to do was deal with the chip on his partner's shoulder.

  "Here," Harry said, tossing the keys to Zimmerman. "You can drive."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lou Mason read about Jack Cullan's murder in Wednesday morning's Kansas City Star while the wind whipped past his office windows overlooking Broadway. In the spring, Mason would open the windows, letting the breeze wrap itself around him like a soft sweatshirt on a cool day. Wednesday morning's wind was more like a garrote twisted around the city's throat by Mother Nature turned Boston Strangler.

  The story of Cullan's murder was two days old but still front-page news. The reporter, Rachel Firestone, wrote that Cullan had been at the center of an investigation into the decision of the mayor and the Missouri Gaming Commission to approve a license for a riverboat casino called the Dream. The Dream had opened recently, docked on the Missouri River at the limestone landing where nineteenth-century fur traders had first thought to build the trading post that became Kansas City.

  Cullan's client, Edward Fiora, owned the Dream. Whispers that Cullan had secured the Dream's license with well-orchestrated bribes of Mayor Sunshine and of Beth Harrell, the chair of the gaming commission, had circulated like tabloid vapor, titillating but unproved. The reporter had dubbed the brewing scandal the "Nightmare on Dream Street."

  Mason put the paper down to answer his phone. "Lou Mason," he said. When he'd first gone into solo practice, he'd answered the phone by saying, "Law office," until one of his clients had asked to speak to Mr. Office.

  "I need you downstairs," Blues said, and hung up.

  Blues was Wilson Bluestone, Jr., Mason's landlord, private investigator, and more often than Mason would like, the one person Mason counted on to watch his back. Blues owned the bar on the first floor, Blues on Broadway. He never admitted to needing anything, so Mason took his statement seriously.

  Mason double-timed down the lavender-carpeted hallway, past the art deco light fixtures spaced evenly on the wall between the offices on the second floor. One office belonged to Blues, another to a PR flack, and a third to a CPA. They were all solo acts.

  He bounded down the stairs at the end of the hall, bracing one hand on the wobbly rail, his feet just brushing the treads, making a final turn into the kitchen. The cold urgency in Blues's voice propelled him past the grill almost too fast to catch the greasy scent of the Reuben sandwiches cooked there the night before. A sudden burst of broken glass mixed with the crack of overturned furniture and the thick thud of a big man put down.

  "Goddammit, Bluestone!" Harry Ryman shouted. Harry hated bars and Blues too much to pay an early morning social call, especially on a day that would freeze your teeth.

  Mason picked up his pace, shoved aside the swinging door between the kitchen and the bar, and plunged into a frozen tableau on the edge of disaster. Blues stood in the middle of the room surrounded by Harry Ryman and another detective Mason recognized as Harry's partner, Carl Zimmerman, and a uniformed cop.

  The beat cop and Zimmerman were aiming their service revolvers at Blues's head. Another uniformed cop was on his knees next to a table lying on its side, surrounded by broken dishes, rubbing a growing welt on his cheek with one hand and holding a pair of handcuffs with the other.

  Blues and Harry were squared off in front of each other, heavyweights waiting for the first bell. Harry's dead-eyed cop glare matched Blues's flat street stare. In a tale of the tape, it was hard to pick a favorite. Though half a foot shy of Blues's six-four, Harry had a solid, barreled girth that was tough to rock. Blues was chiseled, lithe, and deadly. Harry carried the cop-worn look of the twenty years he had on Blues.

  No one moved. Steam rose off the cops' shoulders as the snow they had carried inside melted in the warmth of the bar. The wind beat against the front door, rattling its frame, like someone desperate to get inside. Blues was spring-loaded, never taking his eyes from Harry's.

  Mason spoke softly, as if the sound of his voice would detonate the room. "Harry?" Ryman didn't answer.

  The uniformed cop on his feet was a skinny kid with droopy eyes and a puckered mouth who'd probably never drawn his gun outside the shooti
ng range and couldn't control the tremor in his extended arms.

  Carl Zimmerman was a compact middleweight who held his gun as if it were a natural extension of his hand, no hesitation in his trigger finger. His dark face was a calm pool.

  The solidly built cop Blues had put on the floor had gotten to his feet, his block-cut face flush with embarrassment and anger, anxious for redemption and ready to take Blues on again. He took a step toward Blues, and Carl Zimmerman put a hand on his shoulder and held him back.

  "You're going down, Bluestone," Harry said.

  "I told your boy not to put his hands on me," Blues answered.

  "Officer Toland was doing his job and I'm doing mine. Don't make this worse than it already is."

  "Harry?" Mason said again.

  "This doesn't concern you, Lou," Harry answered, not taking his eyes off Blues.

  "That's bullshit, Harry, and you know it."

  Harry Ryman was the closest thing Mason had to a father. He and Mason's aunt Claire had been together for years and had been unconventional surrogates for Mason's parents, who had been killed in a car accident when Mason was three years old. Blues had saved Mason's life and was the closest thing Mason had to a brother. Whatever was going down didn't just concern Mason. It threatened to turn his world inside out.

  Harry said to Blues, "I'm gonna cuff you. Everybody gets cuffed, even if we have to shoot them first. You remember that much, don't you, Bluestone?"

  Blues looked at Mason, silently asking the obvious with the same flat expression. Mason nodded, telling him to go along. Blues slowly turned his back on Harry, disguising his rage with a casual pivot, extending his arms behind him, managing a defiant posture even in surrender. Harry fastened the handcuffs around Blues's wrists and began reciting the cop's mantra.

  "You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney-"

  "I'm his attorney," Mason interrupted. "What's the charge?"

  Harry looked at Mason for the first time, a tight smile cutting a thin line across his wide face. Mason saw the satisfaction in Harry's smile and the glow of long-sought vindication in his eyes. He had always warned Mason that Blues would cross the line one day and that he would be there to take him down; that the violent, self-styled justice Blues had employed when he was a cop, and since then, was as corrupt as being on the take. As much as Harry might have longed to make that speech again, instead he said it all with one word.

  "Murder." Harry held Mason's astonished gaze. "Murder in the first degree," he added. "You can talk to your client downtown after we book him."

  Mason watched as they filed out, first the two uniformed cops, then Carl Zimmerman, then Blues. As Harry reached the door, Mason called to him.

  "Who was it, Harry?"

  Harry had had the steely satisfaction of the triumphant cop when he'd forced Blues to submit moments ago. Now his face sagged as he looked at Mason, seeing him for the first time as an adversary. Harry thought about the battle that lay ahead between them before responding.

  "Jack Cullan. Couldn't have been some punk. It had to be Jack Fucking Cullan." Harry turned away, disappearing into the wind as the door closed behind him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mason scraped the crystallized snow off the windshield of his Jeep Cherokee. The cast-iron sky hung low enough that he half expected to scrape it off the glass as well. His car was parked behind the bar, a reminder that covered parking was the only perk he missed from his days as a downtown lawyer. The Jeep was strictly bad-weather transportation. His TR6 was hibernating in his garage, waiting for a top-down day.

  He drove north on Broadway, a signature street of rising and falling fortunes Kansas City wore like an asphalt ID bracelet. From the lip of the Missouri River on the north edge of downtown to the Country Club Plaza shopping district, forty-seven blocks south, Broadway was high-rise and low-rise, professionals and payday loans, insurance and uninsurable, homes and homeless, the Big Man and the Little Man elbowing each other for position.

  Mason wondered how Blues had been linked to Cullan's murder. As far as he knew, they had never even met. Maybe something had happened between them when Blues was a cop, something that led to Cullan's murder years later. Mason dismissed that as unlikely. Blues didn't carry grudges for years. He settled them or expunged them.

  It was possible that Cullan had surfaced in one of the cases Blues had handled as a private investigator, as either a target or a client. Blues didn't talk with Mason about his cases, unless he needed Mason's help.

  Before he bought the bar, Blues taught piano at the Conservatory of Music. Cullan hadn't seemed the type to take up music late in life, and teaching someone the difference between bass clef and treble clef wasn't likely to drive Blues to murder. At his worst, Blues would tell a student to play the radio instead of the piano.

  Harry Ryman was right about one thing. Blues had his own system of justice and he didn't hesitate to use violence to enforce it. For Blues, violence was a great equalizer, leveling the playing field against long odds. Few people would use it, even those who threatened it. The threat without follow-through was weak, a shortcoming Blues couldn't abide. Blues wasn't casual about violence, though. He wielded it with the precision and purpose of a surgeon using a scalpel.

  Blues and Harry were partners when Blues was a rookie cop and Harry was the veteran who was supposed to teach him about the street. Harry was by the book and Blues wrote his own book. Their partnership, and Blues's career as a cop, ended six years earlier when Blues shot and killed a woman during a drug bust. Internal Affairs gave Blues the choice of quitting or being prosecuted. He quit.

  Harry had warned Mason against working with Blues, predicting that Blues would go down one day and that Harry would be there, waiting. Blues shrugged when Mason told him what Harry said, refusing to talk about the case that had fractured their relationship.

  Saying that Harry and Blues hated each other was too simple an explanation. Harry and Blues shared a wound neither man could heal. Whenever the three of them were together, Mason felt like he was on the bomb squad, trying to guess whether Blues or Harry would go off first.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Sergeant Peterson," Mason said, reading the desk sergeant's name tag, "I'm Lou Mason. Harry Ryman brought Wilson Bluestone in a few minutes ago. I'm Bluestone's lawyer."

  Peterson was reading USA Today. He looked at Mason over his half-glasses, sighed his resentment at Mason's intrusion, dropped his paper, and picked up the phone.

  "He's here," he said and hung up, returning to his paper.

  A civilian police department employee materialized and escorted Mason to the second-floor detective squad room, pointing him to a hard-backed chair. The squad room reflected the uninspired use of public money-pale walls, faded vanilla tile, and banged-up steel desks covered with the antiseptic details of destroyed lives.

  Mason waited while the crosscurrents of cops and their cases flowed around him. He'd been here before, waiting to be questioned and accused. An ambivalent mix of urgency and resignation permeated the place. Cops had a special sweat, born of the need to preserve and protect and the fearful realization that they were too often outnumbered. That sweat was strongest in homicide.

  Homicide cops took the darkest confessions of the cruelest impulses. They sweet-talked, cajoled, and deceived the guilty into speaking the unspeakable. The more they heard, the more they were overwhelmed by one simple truth: there were more people willing to kill than they could stop from killing. Sterile statistics on closed cases couldn't mask the smell of blood and the taste for vengeance that clung to homicide cops like a second skin.

  Justice was supposed to cleanse them, but the pressure to make an arrest could wash justice down the drain. Even a good cop like Harry Ryman wasn't immune. If he was going to save Blues, Mason knew he had to slow down the clock.

  Saving Blues also meant taking o
n Harry Ryman. Mason could remember the days when Harry used to pick him up by his belt loops and swing him up over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. And Mason could remember the day he graduated from law school and Harry bear-hugged him with a father's pride. Easing his grip just enough to see Mason's face, Harry told him how to navigate the uncertain waters that his clients would take him through.

  "Just do the right thing. You won't have any trouble knowing what it is. The only hard part is doing it."

  Life was never more complicated than that for Harry. He interrupted Mason's memories.

  "You can see him now. He's in number three. No one will be watching or listening. And don't worry about it being my case. Just do your job and I'll do mine."

  Blues was standing at the far end of the room staring into a mirror, his burnished-coppery skin, straight black hair, and fiery eyes muted under the exposed fluorescent tubes that hung from the ceiling.

  "You're not that good-looking," Mason told him.

  "I get prettier every day. It's a two-way mirror and this room is wired for sound."

  "Harry said that no one is watching or listening."

  "You believe him?"

  "I believe that he's not that stupid. If they want you for this murder, they aren't going to fuck it up like that."

  "Don't count on it."

  Mason thought about Wally Sutherland, his first criminal defense client. Wally's one-thing-led-to-another encounter with a woman he'd met in a bar ended with his arrest for attempted forcible rape. When Mason visited him in jail, he cried for his wife, his mother, and God, in that order. Mason had never seen Blues cry and didn't expect he ever would.

  "Did they question you?"

  "Nothing official. Harry tried to make it like old times. Good old Harry stroking me, telling me how much easier it would be just to get the whole thing over with. His partner, Zimmerman, tells him to hold off until you got here. Harry says to Zimmerman that I'm too smart to fall for any tricks, especially since I had been such a smart cop, saying that he was just reminding me of what I already knew."