Lou Mason Mystery - 01 - Motion to Kill (14 page)

“How hard can it be? You give the IRS agent your tax returns and answer a few questions.”

“If all they wanted was my tax returns, there wouldn’t be an audit. I file my taxes on time every year. They’ve got the returns.”

Mason sat up straight, appreciating the seriousness of Harlan’s situation.

“Have they asked for any specific records?”

Harlan didn’t answer. He gripped the pencil with both hands, studying it as if the answer lay in the dull lead tip.

“They want records of my income outside the firm and my business expenses.”

“Is that a problem?”

Harlan snapped the pencil in half and dropped the pieces onto Mason’s desk. A thin trickle of blood dripped from the fat of his palm. He pulled a sliver of pencil from his skin and wiped his hand on his trouser.

“Lou, I can’t pass the audit. I’ve been underreporting income and overstating my expenses.”

Harlan shrugged his shoulders, stuck his hands in his pockets, and glued his eyes to the floor. He was a child hoping for his father’s promise that everything would be all right.

“Who else knows about your tax problems?”

“Scott. I tried talking to him but he just got angry and told me to get out. Said I should have known better.”

His eyes began to water.

“When’s your first meeting with the IRS agent?”

“Monday morning at ten.”

“Would you like me to go with you?”

Mason offered because he thought Harlan couldn’t bring himself to ask. Harlan wasn’t strong, but he was proud. It was a curiously sympathetic combination. Harlan was in trouble, which meant that Mason couldn’t keep his nose out of Harlan’s business.

Harlan straightened a bit and shook off the suggestion. “When the day comes that I can’t handle some snot-nosed IRS kid, I’d better hang it up.”

“That snot-nosed kid can send you away for a long time, Harlan. We’ve lost one senior partner this week. That’s my limit.”

“Don’t worry. The government will always make a deal for the right price,” he said before leaving.

Mason wondered what Harlan had to offer that would be good enough to wipe the slate clean on income tax evasion. He couldn’t decide whether the question or the answer bothered him more.

Sandra Connelly stopped by Mason’s office at three o’clock Friday afternoon. “Eight o’clock okay? Dress casual,” she said.

His blank look told her he’d forgotten about their dinner date. Recollection came an instant too late.

“You forgot, didn’t you?”

He didn’t expect the disappointment in her voice. Sandra wasn’t someone who let people know they’d hurt her feelings. She just found ways to remind them that paybacks are hell.

“Jesus, Sandra, I’m sorry. This has been a rotten week. I wouldn’t be good company anyway. Rain check till next weekend?”

“Sure, no problem. You don’t know what you’re missing, though.”

Her wolfish smile gave Mason a pretty good idea, but fooling around with a partner, even one as tempting as Sandra, was a low-percentage move. And he couldn’t understand her sudden interest, since he’d never shown up on her radar before.

The worst thing was that part of him didn’t object to the image of being taken advantage of by her. Which reminded him of the one and only piece of advice Aunt Claire ever gave him about sex: Think with the big head, not the little head.

Mason finished reviewing the O’Malley billing memos, checking them against the master index of matters Diane Farrell had generated. The firm had been billing O’Malley between a million and a million and a half dollars a year for four of the last five years. In the last twelve months, the billings had jumped to two million.

The only problem was that half a million had been charged to two matters that didn’t exist except in the billing memos. O’Malley had paid five hundred thousand dollars for work that had never been done. Nobody could have pulled that off without Angela knowing about it. Mason called her and told her to come to his office.

“The staff reads all these closed doors like smoke signals,” she said as she closed his. “They figure something big must be happening. It’s one of the best sources of office intelligence next to monitoring radio traffic and troop movements.”

“Yeah, I know. But this has been a closed-door kind of week. I’ve gone over these billing memos, Angela, and I—”

“—figured out that O’Malley was paying for work we didn’t do.”

“Do you always—”

“—interrupt and complete other people’s sentences? Sorry, it’s a bad habit. I knew you’d figure it out when you asked for the billing memos. No point in hiding it.”

“I appreciate your candor. Why didn’t you blow the whistle on Sullivan?”

“It’s none of my business what the firm charges its clients.”

Mason shook his head. “Angela, I’ve only been here a few months, but the one thing I know is that there’s nothing that goes on in this place that you don’t consider your business. Try me again.”

“You’re giving me too much credit. I’m a bean counter. That’s all. My job is to make sure clients pay their bills so we can pay ours and that there’s money left at the end of the year for my Christmas bonus.”

“So you knew that Sullivan was billing O’Malley half a million dollars for work we didn’t do and never once asked him why?”

“I didn’t say that. You did.”

Mason let out an exasperated sigh. “Okay, Angela. Let’s play cross-examination. Did you talk to Sullivan about the bills to O’Malley for work we didn’t do?”

She smiled at his frustration. “Isn’t it fun to use all that education, Lou? Sure, I talked to him. He was the boss.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“To keep my mouth shut …” She let her answer dangle, teasing him with the part left unspoken.

“Or else what?”

She eased back in her chair. “Or else he would have me arrested.” She said it with sudden resignation, her bravado exhausted. “Sullivan was blackmailing me. I had cash-flow problems last year and I took an interest-free loan from the firm without asking. He figured it out.”

“And if you told the partners about O’Malley, he’d—”

“—go to the police about my loan. I even slept with him, thinking that he might decide to forget about it.”

Her eyes never left Mason’s as she spoke. She’d been caught, but she was tough.

“What happened to the money you borrowed?”

“I paid it back with my bonus at the end of the year.”

“Anything else I should know, like why O’Malley would pay us for work we didn’t do?”

“Ask O’Malley. He’s never given anything away in his life. I’ll clean my desk out over the weekend.”

“Why?”

“Oh, don’t tell me I have to sleep with you too. You’re good-looking enough and all that, but I’ve lost my appetite for lawyers.”

“We need some continuity around here, and you’re too valuable to lose. Stick around. I’ll be straight with you if you’ll do the same and let me—”

“—finish your own sentences?”

“Agreed.”

Mason’s phone rang and Angela excused herself. It was Webb Chapman.

“What am I supposed to do with these hooks? Decorate my Christmas tree?” he asked.

“Something simpler. Figure out which one was on Tommy Douchant’s belt.”

“Why do you think one of them might have been his?”

“Never underestimate a crazy woman.”

Webb listened without interruption as he told him about his meeting with Ellen.

“It’s an entertaining story. But it gets you nowhere on identifying Tommy’s hook. You’ll have to give me a clue where to start.”

“Do any of them look like they failed?”

“They all do. That doesn’t prove Tommy was using one of them.”

“Keep them anyway. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

Mason hung up as he pictured Tommy rolling his wheelchair back and forth across the threshold of his front door. He wasn’t going back there with more bad news. His problems with St. John and O’Malley were screaming at him louder than Tommy. His would have to wait until he got them under control, or until he dreamt of Tommy’s trial again. Whichever came first.

Mason and his team worked through the weekend. He told Sandra about the phony bills to O’Malley, but they found nothing in the files to explain the fees.

If she was angry with Mason for breaking their date, she kept it to herself. By Sunday night, they were the only ones left in the conference room. They had finished reviewing the files on O’Malley’s loans from his bank.

“St. John has O’Malley cold,” Sandra said.

“Ice-cold. He convinced the bank to loan money to dummy businesses that he secretly owned. The businesses couldn’t pay the money back and had no assets for the bank to foreclose on when the loans went bad.”

“Sullivan set up the companies, drafted the loan documents, sat in on the bank’s loan committee meetings, and told everyone the loans were okay.”

“So Sullivan was going down too.”

“Not necessarily, Lou. Sullivan could claim that he was relying on information provided by O’Malley and that he didn’t know the truth.”

“Sullivan asked me to destroy documents that would implicate him. There’s nothing here that St. John couldn’t get from the bank and O’Malley.”

Sandra gave him a look sharper than the knife she carried. “These details slip out of your mouth so frequently. Wouldn’t it be just as easy to tell me sooner?”

“Yeah, but it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.” He recoiled as she smacked him on the arm. “Fine,” he told her, trying not to wince. “We had lunch last Friday. That’s when he asked me. I told him no before he could even tell me which documents.”

“Why wouldn’t he just destroy the documents himself?”

“He may have. But by asking me, he sets me up to take the fall. If I agree, he owns me. If I refuse—which I did—he claims that it was my idea and uses it to get rid of me, which he tried to do.”

Mason told her about the note Kelly Holt had found in Sullivan’s suite at the lake.

“Sullivan wouldn’t have gone to that much trouble unless somebody else knew about the documents,” she said. “Otherwise, he’d destroy them and no one would know they ever existed.”

“And we still haven’t figured out the fixtures deals with Quintex. But we’ve got enough to talk to O’Malley about tomorrow.”

“What if O’Malley doesn’t come clean?”

“We quit and get ready to go to war with him and the feds.”

“I don’t like the odds,” Sandra said. “We’re outnumbered and surrounded.”

“So we’ll have to fight dirty,” Mason said.

There was a message from Harlan Christenson on Mason’s answering machine when he got home just before midnight. Harlan had left the message three hours earlier.

“Lou, it’s Harlan. I know it’s late, but I was hoping you’d come out to the farm. I need to talk with you about my meeting tomorrow morning with the IRS agent. I’ve got to make a deal. I just don’t know how. Call me when you get home. Please.”

Mason heard fear in Harlan’s voice, the icy kind when a car slams on its brakes and shrieks to a stop at your feet. He dialed Harlan’s number and listened to a recorded explanation that the number was no longer in service or had been disconnected. Thinking he may have misdialed, Mason tried again with the same result.

Harlan’s farm was in Stanley, Kansas, twenty miles south of Mason’s house and ten miles west of the state line. The nearest neighbor was half a mile away. City lights melted into inky blackness as Mason drove into the country, thinking about the hours he had spent tramping through the fields with Harlan, casting a line in his pond, catching nothing but good memories.

The farmhouse was black and silent beneath a distant canopy of stars, the darkness swallowing Mason when he stepped out of his car. The only sound was a distant train whistle riding the night air. As he approached the house, he could make out a faint glow leaking around the edges of a front window.

There was no answer when he knocked on the weather-beaten door. He squeezed the handle, his palm sweaty, cursing under his breath as the door swung open and he stepped into the entry hall.

He was fearless in the courtroom, willing to take risks others wouldn’t because he was prepared and because he owned the ground, the battle one he’d chosen. Outside those walls, he’d never considered whether he was brave or what that even meant. Stepping across the threshold, he realized that bravery and stupidity were first cousins.

Mason called out to Harlan. He didn’t answer. Afraid of what he might find, he hesitated, light-headed and breaking into a sweat from the sluggish mix of heat and humidity inside the house.

The entry hall led straight back to the kitchen and the light he had seen from the porch, a dozen steps. He took one and then another, stopping as the floorboards creaked beneath his feet, listening for what he didn’t know, hearing nothing, starting again.

A man materialized out of the darkness, blotting out the light from the kitchen, and drilled his fist into Mason’s gut. Mason folded in half as the man grabbed him by the back of his shirt and threw him headlong down the length of the hall and onto the kitchen floor.

Gasping for air, his eyes clenched, Mason rose on hands and knees, when a boot to his back put him on the floor. He curled into a fetal crouch, waiting for the next blow. When it didn’t come and he heard the front door slam, he opened his eyes. Harlan lay next to him, tongue clenched between his teeth, bulging dead eyes staring past him into the fluorescent glow of the open refrigerator.

The silence was split by the cough of a grinding engine and tires spitting gravel. Mason crawled away from Harlan’s body and huddled against the front door, shaking, waiting for the nerve to go outside. Moments passed before he stumbled out the door, slumped into his car, and called 911. He passed the time wondering whether to charge the call to the firm. Claire always told him that humor was the last thread of sanity. He clung to it.