Lou Mason Mystery - 02 - The Last Witness Read online

  “I’ve got a better idea. Don’t ask for bail. If we don’t fight for it, they can’t hold it over me. Spend your time finding out who killed Cullan, not writing motions the judge is going to turn down anyway.”

  Mason studied Blues for a moment. “You won’t have any friends inside.”

  Blues gave Mason a broad grin. “You’d be surprised how easy I make friends. There’s just two things you need to worry about besides winning my case.”

  “What?”

  “First thing is you got to find somebody to run the club. Try Mickey Shanahan. He’s the PR guy whose office is next to yours. He’s always behind on his rent. Tell him he can work it off behind the bar.”

  “Okay. What’s the second thing?”

  “You’re on your own. Don’t get dead. They’ll throw away the key to my cell.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mason found Patrick Ortiz talking to the assistant prosecutors. They stopped talking when Mason approached, the younger lawyers looking away to hide their smirks.

  “You were way out of line with that shit about Blues being forced to resign from the police department,” Mason said. “You know that there’s no way in hell that comes into evidence. Except now it will be the lead on every newscast and plastered on the front page. You must want me to file a motion to move the trial out of town so my client can get a fair trial.”

  “I’m not going to tell you how to try your case. Bluestone already shot one person to death. That may not be admissible to prove he killed Jack Cullan, but it’s sure as hell relevant to the sentence he’s going to get and whether he should get bail.”

  “Forget about the bail. You’re lucky that Blues is more patient than I am. He’ll take the county up on its offer of hospitality until the trial.”

  Ortiz’s assistants lost their smirks, but Ortiz maintained his poker face. “As long as he’s prepared to sit for a while, maybe he’d like to talk about a plea.”

  “Is that how you pump up your conviction record? Squeeze the hard cases until they plead and take the chumps to trial? The only plea my client is going to make is innocent. Be sure to tell that to whoever is yanking your chain on this one.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mickey Shanahan’s office was smaller than Mason’s and didn’t have any windows. It did have a lot of posters. Mostly from political campaigns. Mickey didn’t have a desk. Instead, he had a card table and four chairs.

  When Mason knocked on the open door, Mickey was straddling one of the chairs, his back to the door, wadding up pages from the morning paper and tossing them at a basketball goal, making the swish sound regardless of whether he made the shot.

  Mickey had been a tenant for six months. Mason liked his scrappy attitude but couldn’t figure out how he made a living. Blues told him that Mickey had graduated from college a couple of years earlier, worked for a big PR firm in town, and then decided to go it alone. That was when he signed a lease with Blues. Mason had yet to see a client walk into or out of Mickey’s office and wasn’t surprised that Mickey was behind on his rent.

  “Hey, Mickey. What’s going on, man?”

  Mickey glanced over his shoulder, beamed when he saw Mason, and scrambled to his feet.

  “You’re asking me?” Mickey picked up the front page of the newspaper with the two-inch headline announcing Ex-Cop Arrested for Murder of Political Boss. “I should be asking you. No, I shouldn’t. I should be telling you to hire me to handle the PR on this case. I’m telling you, this case, win or lose—and don’t get me wrong, I’m pulling for you and Blues—this case can make you in this town; Blues too, if you win. It’s all about how you spin it.”

  Mickey had an unruly shock of brown hair that fell across his pale Irish forehead. He could pour nutrition shakes down his throat with a funnel and still be invisible when he turned sideways. He was a finger-tapping, pencil-twirling, punch-line machine, all revved up with no place to go.

  “I’ll keep that in mind. In the meantime, Blues wants you to run the club for a while. The judge wouldn’t let him out on bail. He says you can work off the back rent you owe him.”

  “Outstanding!” He crossed the short distance to the door and gave Mason a fist bump. “Outstanding!”

  “I’ll tell Blues you said so,” Mason told him. “Do you know what to do?”

  “Haven’t a fucking clue, man. But no one will know the difference. That’s why they call it PR!”

  He raced down the stairs, and Mason retreated to his office, stepping over and around the files, clothes, and junk scattered on the floor and furniture, remembering his aunt Claire’s theory of the relationship between men’s stuff and available space.

  “No matter how much crap a man has,” she told him when she visited his office, “he will fill every available inch of open space. Put him in a smaller office with just as much stuff, and the stuff shrinks to fit. Add a hundred square feet and his stuff will spread over it like a rising tide.”

  Bookshelves lined the wall on either side of the door. Client files were crammed into the shelves on one side and books filled the other. More files, a rugby football, and a pair of sweats competed for room on an overstuffed corduroy-covered sofa on which he’d spent more than a few nights.

  A low table and two chairs in front of the sofa formed a seating area. Mason dropped his topcoat on one chair and his suit coat on the other.

  A four-foot-by-six-foot dry-erase board enclosed by burnished oak doors was mounted on the wall opposite the sofa. The inside panels of the doors were covered in cork. A rolled screen was mounted above the dry-erase surface. Mason was a visual thinker. He kept track of ideas, questions, and answers by writing them in different colors on the dry-erase board. He pinned notes he wrote to himself onto the cork surface. He studied his board until order emerged from the chaos, and when a problem was solved, he erased it.

  His desk sat in front of the exterior wall in a three-sided windowed alcove, flanked on one side by a computer workstation housing a combination printer, fax, scanner, and copier and on the other by a small refrigerator that was usually empty except for a six-pack of Bud. Mason didn’t have enough room or business to support a secretary. He gave thanks every day to his eighth-grade typing teacher, who had threatened to hold him back if he didn’t learn to touch-type.

  A faded Persian rug covered the center of the hardwood floor, a gift from Claire, who said the place needed a little class.

  Mason opened the doors to the dry-erase board, picked up a red marker, and began writing. Next to Jack Cullan’s name he wrote victim/fixer and the questions Who’s afraid of Jack? and Who wins if Jack dies?

  Switching to black, he wrote Blues—at the scene?—connection to Cullan?

  Still using the black marker, he wrote on the next line: Harry—why so certain about Blues? Who’s pushing Harry?

  He wrote Beth Harrell’s name in blue, adding—why with Cullan?

  His last entry was in red—who else?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rachel Firestone knocked on Mason’s door and opened it without waiting for an invitation. He was at his desk, reading the police reports. He looked up, instinctively turning them over.

  She looked first at Mason and then at the board before she even said hello. Mason couldn’t prevent her from reading everything he’d written, so he pretended not to care rather than give her the satisfaction of thinking she’d seen something she shouldn’t have.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking you if you had an appointment.”

  “I don’t suppose there was any reason to ask for one since you’d just tell me no.”

  “Can’t argue with that. How about I just tell you no anyway and you leave?”

  “Give it up, Lou. I’m on this story and you’re on this case. We can’t avoid each other. It won’t be that bad. You’ll get used to me. You’ll probably even get a crush on me, make a stupid pass, and I’ll break your heart and make your testicles shrivel like raisins.”

  Mason took a good
look at her as she posed for him, hands on her hips, her chin punched out at him in a devilish, take-your-best-shot angle. She was luminescent, inviting, and somehow unattainable. Mason felt a surge that had been dormant since he’d broken up with Kelly Holt, the woman who had investigated the murders of his former partners. It was the jolting combination of need, desire, and unexpected opportunity. He’d dated a few women since Kelly, but the only connection he made with them was glandular.

  “And why would you do that? The testicles part, I mean.”

  “Can’t be helped, Lou. I’m gay. I’m a boots, jeans, flannel-shirt-wearing, short-haired lipstick lesbian, and I’m a knockout in a simple black dress I keep in my closet for special occasions. If women got me the way guys do, I’d be fighting them off.”

  “That would do it,” he conceded as his rising sap retreated to its roots. “Thanks for sparing me.”

  “Not a problem. I like getting that out of the way up front. Fewer complications,” she added as she picked up the football and made a place for herself on the sofa. She tossed the ball back and forth between her hands, frowning at its odd feel.

  “It’s for rugby.”

  “That’s a hard-hitting game. You play?”

  “Not as much as I used to. I’m getting a little old to dive into the middle of a bunch of maniacs going after the ball. I’ll take you to a game in the spring,” he offered without understanding why.

  “Great. I’d like that,” she said with a smile that filled him with regret. “So Beth Harrell was with Jack Cullan the night he was killed,” Rachel said, pointing to Mason’s board.

  “You heard that too?”

  “Yup. I tried to talk with her, but she keeps her door locked. Any idea why they were out together?”

  Mason hesitated. He felt as if he were walking on an active fault line with Rachel that could cleave open and swallow him at any moment. She was beautiful, flirtatious, and completely unavailable. She knew she had him off balance and was enjoying his disadvantage.

  “I think we need some ground rules.”

  “So do I. Here’s freedom-of-the-press rule number one. Everything’s on the record unless you tell me in advance that it isn’t on the record.”

  Mason shook his head. “Here’s defense-lawyer rule number one. Nothing is on the record unless I say so. Rule number two—burn me and I’ll cut you off at the knees.”

  Rachel folded her arms over her chest. “You’re just angry about the lesbian thing. Hey, it wasn’t my idea. A girl doesn’t get to choose. Not that I’m complaining.”

  Mason got up and started to close the doors to the dry-erase board.

  “Okay, okay,” she told him. “Nothing is on the record unless you say so.”

  “Good. I don’t know why they were at the bar, but I think she’ll tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “First, because I’m not going to print it on the front page of the newspaper in a story accusing her of being a crook. Second, I can put her under oath and make her tell me, and third, we know each other.”

  “How?”

  “I took ethics from her when she taught at the law school. I was a first-year student and it was her first semester teaching. We hit it off pretty well, but I’ve only run into her a few times since I graduated. Alumni functions and that kind of thing.”

  Rachel nodded. “Is your client guilty?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me so.”

  “That’s not good enough for an acquittal.”

  “It’s good enough for me. All I have to do is figure out who did kill Jack Cullan. The cops are done looking. Any suggestions?”

  “I’ve been chasing Jack Cullan for three years. He was into everything important that happened or didn’t happen in this town. Want to get elected? Go see Jack. Want to cut a deal with the city? Need tax increment financing? How about the concessions at the airport? Go see Jack. He always delivered the goods.”

  “How did he do it? Where did he get that kind of influence?”

  “Cullan invested in the long term. Long-term relationships and long-term IOUs. One day, the city wakes up and peeks out from under its covers. Only the view is from Jack Cullan’s back pocket. I’ve been picking up threads. I can’t get anyone to corroborate it, but I’m convinced that Cullan took a page from J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook.”

  “Files filled with secrets?”

  “On everyone who is anyone.”

  “You said you couldn’t corroborate that. What makes you think it’s true?”

  “The same thing that makes you think your client is innocent. I can feel it.”

  She picked up the red marker and wrote Cullan’s Secret Files on the board.

  “Anyone who was in those files may have had a motive to kill Cullan,” Mason said. “And the rest of them would give anything to make certain the files stayed secret. The easiest way for that to happen is to make certain Blues is found guilty.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. You find the files first, I get the exclusive. I find the files first, I’ll let you see them before I go public.”

  “Deal. Why so generous?”

  “Let’s just say that I’m a sucker for good-looking rugby players. In fact, I’m dating one now. She’s fabulous. I’ll be in touch,” she said as she left.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mason finished studying the police reports without finding any daggers to throw at Harry on cross-examination. He had been as thorough as Mason had expected.

  The crime scene had been preserved, none of the evidence contaminated. Photographs were taken from every angle, fingerprints lifted from every surface, and a meticulous search had been made for footprints and fibers that didn’t belong.

  The contents of the house had been inventoried and double-checked against Cullan’s homeowner’s insurance records. No valuables were missing and there was no sign of forced entry. Cullan had opened the door to someone who had come there for one reason—to kill him.

  The maid passed a polygraph exam and thirty people at a family reunion in Omaha confirmed her alibi that she was out of town when Cullan was killed.

  Beth Harrell and the musicians at the bar gave statements that established Blues’s motive. And Blues didn’t have an alibi.

  The case had shifted from catching Cullan’s killer to proving that Blues was guilty. If none of the witnesses saw Cullan scratch Blues’s hands during their scuffle at the bar, he would have to take the stand in his own defense. No matter how certain he was of Blues’s innocence, Mason knew that was a high-stakes gamble. Patrick Ortiz would come in his pants at the prospect of taking on Blues.

  There was nothing Mason could do about any of the evidence the prosecutor already had against Blues. He wouldn’t make the mistake of trying to win the case on the prosecution’s ground. Instead, he’d have to find the killer.

  He stared out the windows, listening to the icy wind swarm over the city, slip-sliding through weak spots in brick and mortar, seeping into cracks and faults, sucking out the warmth. He imagined that Jack Cullan had been that way, wrapping his own cold fingers around the weak spots in other people’s hearts until they became brittle and broke in his hands.

  The warmth in his office was small comfort. He’d be out in the wind soon enough, playing catch-up with Oritz. The prosecutor was way out in front.

  Mason wouldn’t get any help from the people who’d been under Cullan’s thumb. Though each would light a candle for the killer and ask God to reserve a special place in hell for Cullan, they’d let the wind sweep Blues away.

  Mason picked up the black marker. Beneath his question who else? and Rachel Firestone’s note about Cullan’s secret files, he added the names of Ed Fiora, Billy Sunshine, and Beth Harrell. All three were tied to Jack Cullan. It was all he had.

  Mason began with what he knew about each of them. Ed Fiora owned the Dream Casino. Though he’d passed the gaming commission’s background checks, Rachel’s newspaper stories had him only
a sham corporation or two removed from his leg-breaking days.

  Billy Sunshine was a charismatic mayor who’d steal your vote and your wife with equal aplomb. He was glib and charming, a native son with the ethos of a carpetbagger. More than anything else, he was ambitious. He’d been elected by a wide margin to a second term and, by law, couldn’t run again. The mayor had all but announced he would challenge Delray Shays, the black incumbent congressman, in the next election. Local wags had it that the casino scandal was the only thing holding up the formal announcement. When last asked about it, the mayor said he’d let the people of the Fifth Congressional District decide.

  Beth Harrell was the piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. Ed Fiora was a thug posing as a gaming entrepreneur. Billy Sunshine was the poster boy for mamas not letting their babies grow up to be politicians. Beth Harrell was the good queen.

  Mason remembered her from law school. She was only five years older, having practiced for two years after graduating before becoming a professor. She had dark blond hair that dangled above her shoulders, softening her bold walk. Her body was trim, her lips full, and her eyes said, “Authorized personnel only.” She carried her beauty with the experience of someone used to taking advantage of it and wary of those who would.

  All of which made the class she taught the most popular one offered. Mason resisted the temptation to sit in the front row with his tongue hanging out like his less subtle friends. He worked hard in her class, and she rewarded his effort with a good grade and a friendly handshake whenever they ran into each other over the years.

  Beth’s reputation as an expert in ethics had brought her to the attention of the governor. When the previous chair of the gaming commission was convicted of accepting kickbacks, the governor turned to Beth to restore credibility to the commission. The license for the Dream Casino was the first major piece of business for the commission after she took over. Mason found it hard to believe that she had stepped over the line.