Lou Mason Mystery - 02 - The Last Witness (18 page)

“How much better?”

“Asset search, bank accounts, anything you want. There are no secrets anymore. Everyone’s life is floating in cyberspace, waiting to be bought or sold.”

“Do it.”

“Does this mean I’m on the team?”

Mason thought for a moment, hoping he wasn’t making the wrong choice, not just for him but for Mickey.

“Sure.”

“Do we get T-shirts? T-shirts would be cool. Great way to build the brand.”

“Only if we win,” Mason said.

A shower and a shave later, Mason parked in front of what was once the People’s Savings & Loan Building on the corner of Twentieth and Main. The bank had owned the six-story building until it went under during the thrift crisis in the 1990s. Jack Cullan bought the building and moved into a second-floor office.

Many law firms spent lavishly on impressive entrances to their offices, with carefully designed logos, nameplates, and eye-catching art, one local firm bragging that the paneling in its office had been made from a rare tree found only in the Amazon rain forest. Mason appreciated the simple inscription painted on the solid oak door to Jack Cullan’s office—
Attorney
.

Shirley Parker looked up from her desk as Mason closed the door behind him. She had a buoyant, upswept hairstyle that had been fashionable decades ago but was now a silvery-blue-tinted artifact. She was a stout woman with stiff posture and disbelieving eyes, going through the motions because she didn’t know what else to do.

“Yes, may I help you?” she asked.

“My name is Lou Mason,” he said, as if that would be explanation enough.

“I’m Shirley Parker, Mr. Cullan’s secretary.”

Mason wasn’t certain where to start. He guessed that Shirley had been Cullan’s secretary long enough to know his secrets and how to keep them and wouldn’t surrender them just because her boss was dead.

“I’m the attorney for Wilson Bluestone.”

“Yes. I know who you are.”

She gave no hint whether she cared who he was or whether she resented him, as she must have hated his client.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

It was a clumsy gesture, and Mason regretted he hadn’t been more sincere, though Shirley was gracious.

“That’s very kind of you.”

Mason looked around, nodding. The furniture in the outer office was nearly as old as he was, though it had fewer nicks and scratches. Framed prints from a Monet exhibit hung on the walls. A stack of unread magazines sat on a corner table at the junction of a short couch and a chair.

“It must be difficult closing up a law practice under these circumstances. I imagine you’ve been going nuts trying to get clients placed with new lawyers, files transferred, and all those other things.”

“Yes,” was all she said, not agreeing or disagreeing.

There were only a handful of papers on Shirley’s desk, no more than would have come in the mail on an ordinary day. Her computer screen was on CNN’s home page. The phone hadn’t rung since Mason walked in.

He realized that there were no storage cabinets, no places to keep client files or the secret files. Maybe Shirley had already transferred the clients and their files and was just coming in each day to open the mail until there was no more mail.

“It looks like you’ve pretty much cleaned things up. You must have already shipped out the client files.”

Shirley didn’t respond, waiting for Mason to say something that warranted another polite acknowledgment.

They smiled at one another for a long minute, neither speaking until Mason quickstepped past her and opened Cullan’s private office. He was through the door before she could try to stop him.

“You can’t go in there!” she said, and was on his heels before he could turn on the light.

The office was a mirror of Mason’s, down to the oversized sofa with shoes and clothes strewn across the cushions and a refrigerator parked next a desk littered with papers. Mason was certain that Shirley had removed anything confidential, leaving the rest in the grief-driven hope that Cullan would walk through the door one day as if nothing had happened.

Shirley stood in the doorway, arms folded across her chest. Mason took a step toward her. She didn’t back up.

“Where are they, Shirley?”

“Where are what?”

“Your boss’s secret files. The dirty pictures and other trash he collected all these years.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. How long did you work for Jack? Twenty years, thirty years? You had to know about the files and you had to know where he kept them.”

She didn’t flinch. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“Of course you do. That’s your job even though your boss isn’t here to tell you. Maybe you didn’t know what he was up to. Maybe he liked you well enough not to make you an accessory to blackmail, extortion, and racketeering. All things considered, you’d be better off helping me now than answering all these questions in court, under oath.”

“As I said, Mr. Mason. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please leave now.”

Mason stopped in front of a black-and-white photograph of an old man and a young boy. They were shaking hands in front of a barbershop, the barber’s pole framed between their outstretched hands. It was on a wall covered with photographs of Cullan with politicians and celebrities, but he didn’t recognize either the man or the boy.

“Who are they?”

Shirley sighed, her hands hard on her hips. “I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave now.”

Mason raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, I’m convinced. Just tell me who’s in the picture and I’ll leave. That can’t be a state secret.”

“Very well. The young boy is Mr. Cullan. The other gentleman is Tom Pendergast. Now, please leave.”

“No kidding? Tom Pendergast. When was this taken? Last question, I promise.”

“I’ll tell you on your way out.” She locked the door to Cullan’s office and ushered him out into the hallway. “Nineteen forty-five,” she said.

Back in his car, Mason looked up at the window to Cullan’s office. For an instant, he thought he saw Shirley Parker lingering in the shadows, but then dismissed the image as a trick of the sun against the glass and his own creeping paranoia.

He started to pull away when he saw a barber pole bolted to the wall of a building across the street. The barbershop, and the rest of the block, was vacant, but the photograph in Cullan’s office and the barber pole triggered his memory of a story his grandfather told him.

Tom Pendergast ran Kansas City during Prohibition and after, ruling with a velvet hammer Cullan must have envied. He was ruthless to some, generous to others, handing down decrees and handing out favors from an office above the abandoned barber shop across the street from Cullan’s office.

Mason’s grandfather, Mike, had gotten his start in the wrecking business when Pendergast had given his blessing to his grandfather’s plan to salvage the scrap from the construction of Bagnel Dam at the Lake of the Ozarks and sell it. Afterward, his grandfather had gone to Pendergast’s office to pay the man his respects and a cut of the profits. Pendergast had accepted the gratitude but not the cash, and Mason’s grandfather had been on his way, though his patron eventually went to jail for tax evasion.

By 1945, when the picture had been taken, Pendergast had been released from jail, his organization lay in ruins, and he had only a short time to live. The young Jack Cullan couldn’t have known or cared about Pendergast’s background. It must have been pure coincidence that he shook hands that day with the man whose career he would emulate. Looking back years later, Cullan probably saw it as a portent, his first step on a well-trod path.

There was a small diner, another relic from pre-fast-food times, one block south on Main. It was the last building on the east side of the street and offered a handful of parking spaces in a lot on the south side of the building. Mason pulled into the parking lot and called Mickey Shanahan.

“Law offices of Lou Mason. To whom may I direct your call?” Mickey said.

“Are you auditioning for a job as a receptionist too?”

“No job too small, no duty too great. Pay me soon; it’s been a week since I ate.”

“I’m not surprised. Your shtick is from hunger. While you’re cruising the Internet, go to the county’s Web site and check property ownership records for 2010 Main. In fact, check the ownership records for that entire block. The west side of Main between Twentieth and Twenty-First. Call me back when you’ve got something.”

The Egg House Diner was a twenty-four-hour restaurant with a counter that seated eight and a row of booths along the front window, none of which were occupied when Mason picked one. A man of indeterminate age, wearing layers of soiled clothing and a strong odor, sat at the counter, stirring a cup of coffee. A large black plastic bag, stuffed to its limit, lay on the floor at his feet.

Mason chose a booth that gave him a clear view of the vacant barbershop. He picked up a menu that had more stains than entries. A few moments later, a flat-faced woman with dull eyes and thin hair, wearing a lime-green-and-white-striped waitress uniform, brought him a glass of water and took his order for a turkey sandwich. He took the first bite when his phone rang, the caller ID telling him it was Mickey.

“What do you have for me?”

“The whole block is owned by New Century Redevelopment Corporation except for 2010 Main. Shirley Parker owns that building. Her name mean anything to you?”

“Yeah. It means I’ll be out the rest of the day.”

Mason spent the afternoon in the booth at the Egg House Diner. The man sitting at the counter did the same. The waitress, used to customers who spent little, talked less, and stayed forever, left him alone. He watched the traffic on Main Street, waiting for Shirley Parker to jaywalk from the People’s Savings & Loan Building to the barbershop across the street.

He wasn’t good at sitting and waiting. He lacked the patience for a stakeout, though he wasn’t certain whether sitting in a restaurant qualified. He figured a real stakeout meant sitting in a dark car, drinking cold coffee, peeing in a bottle, and scrunching down in the front seat whenever someone drove by. He was just killing time in a dumpy diner, kept company by people who had no place else to go.

After a while, he retrieved a yellow legal pad from his car and tried to reproduce the notes from his dry-erase board. He wrote the names and the questions again, adding order and precision to the notes without finding any new answers. He drummed his pen against the pad until the vagrant at the counter silenced him with an annoyed look. No one else came into the diner.

At three o’clock, he ordered a slice of apple pie and a cup of coffee to be polite. He picked at the pie and stirred the coffee, then told the waitress to give it to his counter companion. The man gave him another annoyed look but didn’t send the snack back to Mason’s booth.

By five o’clock, clouds had moved in, hastening the transition from dusk to dark. Headlights blinked on, slicing the gloom on Main Street as people began making their way home. As if on cue, the man at the counter grunted at the waitress, hoisted his plastic bag over his shoulder, and left, giving Mason a final silent stab on his way out the door.

A pair of city buses, one northbound, the other southbound, stopped at the corner of Twentieth and Main, momentarily blocking his view. When the buses pulled away, he saw Shirley Parker jostling the lock on the door to the building that housed the barbershop. He waited until she was inside before leaving the diner, trying to remember when he’d had his last haircut.

The door to Shirley Parker’s building opened into a long, dark hallway that led to the back. Bare wooden stairs to the second floor narrowed the passage. No one was in the hall when Mason stepped inside. He stood still for a moment, listening, hearing nothing.

A door to his right would have opened into the barbershop had it not been lying on its side, propped against the wall as an afterthought. The shop was empty except for an ancient barber chair tilted in the reclining position, as if its last occupant had come in for a shampoo and shave. Steel bars had been bolted to the storefront window frame, a stark concession to the uneasy plight of an abandoned building made too late to save anything but memories.

A naked lightbulb at the top of the stairs cast shadows at Mason’s feet. The silence was broken by the sound of shoes scraping overhead. Shirley Parker was upstairs in Tom Pendergast’s old office.

Mason had spent the afternoon in the Egg House Diner betting that Jack Cullan had hidden his secret files in Pendergast’s office, the irony of using his hero’s headquarters too delicious to pass up. Putting the ownership of the building in Shirley Parker’s name was a thin dodge, arrogance mistaken for cleverness—a common weakness of bad guys. Superman never would have put Jimmy Olson’s name on the deed to the Fortress of Solitude.

Mason had also bet that his questions had unnerved Shirley Parker, forcing her to conduct her own stakeout of the barbershop to confirm that Mason didn’t try to break in. When he didn’t, she still couldn’t resist checking on the files to be certain he hadn’t somehow sneaked past her.

Breaking and entering was a Class D felony, not an upward career move for most lawyers. Mason convinced himself that he was neither breaking nor entering; he was simply making a business visit knowing that Shirley was inside. Besides, he had no intent to commit any crime on the premises, at least not at that moment. He just wanted to talk with Shirley Parker.

As he stood at the foot of the stairs, the plan that had made so much sense as he sat in the booth at the diner now struck him as foolhardy. Shirley had refused to answer his questions in Cullan’s office during normal business hours. Popping up like the Pillsbury Doughboy in Pendergast’s office after hours wouldn’t loosen her tongue. She would call the police, and the files would disappear overnight.