Lou Mason Mystery - 02 - The Last Witness (7 page)

“How many bonus points is that?” Mason asked, hanging up before Carmine could reply.

Mason called back, this time asking for the business office, identifying himself as a lawyer, and asking to speak with Mr. Fiora concerning a criminal matter. Three underlings later, none of whom sounded as if they’d ever left Nebraska, Mason spoke with a woman whose name was Margaret who said she was an assistant to Mr. Fiora.

“My name is Lou Mason. I’m an attorney. It’s very important that I speak with Mr. Fiora about a criminal matter.”

“May I tell Mr. Fiora what the nature of the matter is?”

Mason couldn’t tolerate people who didn’t take their own calls, who hired other people just to answer the phone calls transferred to them by other people who’d been hired for the same purpose, only to ask the caller the nature of the matter. He pictured Margaret sitting at her computer, scrolling down the list of criminal matters that would be worthy of Ed Fiora’s attention.

“You may tell Mr. Fiora that the nature of the matter is the murder of his lawyer, Jack Cullan, and what he might know about it.”

“I see,” Margaret said with more disappointment in Mason than concern for her boss. “I see,” she repeated as if the words had cured her astigmatism.

“So, if you’ll just connect me to Mr. Fiora, I’m sure he’ll want to talk with me.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Mason, Mr. Fiora is not available.”

“And when will he be available, Margaret?”

“I don’t believe that he will ever be available, Mr. Mason. I’m so sorry.”

“Margaret, you aren’t even close to sorry. You aren’t in the same zip code as sorry. Sorry would be that Mr. Fiora had a terrible accident on the way to the office, was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery, but can work me in this afternoon. That would be sorry. This is just a mistake. A big mistake. You tell Mr. Fiora I said so.”

“If you insist, Mr. Mason.”

Mason replayed his conversations with Dawn, Carmine, and Margaret as he settled into his rowing machine and slowly began easing the kinks out of his back. He set the digital readout for ten thousand meters and gradually lost himself in the soothing repetitions of the stroke.

The seat slid backward with each leg drive and rode forward with each pull of his upper body. He imagined that he was sculling downriver, the ripple of his lean wake cutting the water as he slipped unnoticed through the morning’s enveloping mist.

A quick look around reminded Mason that he was in the middle of his dining room and that his rowing machine occupied the space that had been home to a table that seated eight. Not long ago, the Kansas City auxiliary of the Chicago mob had reduced the table, the chairs, and the rest of his worldly possessions to a pile of broken legs, glass, and splinters. It was their way of saying he shouldn’t have taken work home from his last law firm, Sullivan & Christenson.

Mason lived on the money his homeowner’s insurance company paid for the loss of his personal possessions, using part of it to pay the expenses for his childhood friend Tommy Douchant’s lawsuit. By the time Mason settled Tommy’s case and could afford to refurnish the house, he didn’t want to. Instead, he bought only the things he needed, which turned out to be the only things he wanted.

He finished his row. The mist, the lake, and the ache in his body were gone. “Plan your row and row your plan” was the rower’s creed. He hadn’t followed that simple rule when he tried to reach Ed Fiora. Instead, he’d smart-assed his way into a one-punch knockdown that underscored what to expect if he insisted on not getting the message.

After downing a bottle of Gatorade, he went outside for the morning paper. The wind had moved on to punish some other part of the country. A light cover of snow crunched under his feet. The subzero air was bracing. His dog, Tuffy, a German shepherd–collie mixed breed, joined him on the short walk to the end of his driveway. Her blond and black German shepherd colors were layered through her winter coat in a collie’s pattern, complete with a pure white thatch under her chin.

Tuffy raced through the front yard, nose to the ground, sniffing for anything interesting. She found nothing and followed Mason back into the house, where the phone was ringing.

“Hello.”

“It’s Rachel Firestone. What did you think of my story?”

“What story?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t get the paper. The story is on the front page, above the fold.”

“I just brought the paper in,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

Rachel’s story recited Judge Pistone’s refusal to grant bail to Blues and Mason’s implied charge that unknown persons were applying pressure to get either a conviction or a plea bargain that would close the case of Jack Cullan’s murder as soon as possible. It tied Ed Fiora, Mayor Sunshine, and Beth Harrell into a tight circle around Cullan’s body and speculated aloud whether any of them would cooperate with Lou Mason in his defense of Wilson Bluestone, Jr., against a first-degree murder charge and possible death penalty. Fiora, the mayor, and Beth Harrell declined to comment.

“You left out one thing,” he told her.

“What?”

“Off the record.”

“Fine, fine. What?”

“I think Fiora commented privately,” he said, telling her about his parking lot encounter.

“Holy shit! Did you call the cops?”

“What for? There were no witnesses. I couldn’t ID the guy or the car. Besides, I wouldn’t expect to get a sympathetic response. The cops are more likely to look for a cat stranded in a tree than for someone who kicked my ass. And I don’t want to read about that in tomorrow’s paper. I’ll figure some other way to get to Fiora. I don’t think he’ll respond well to being accused in the paper of ordering someone to assault me.”

“My editor would be even less interested in getting sued. Did you have any luck with the mayor or Beth Harrell?”

“Nope. I figure the mayor is the most likely to respond to bad press. I think Beth Harrell will see me because I was an irresistible student.”

“Don’t sit by the phone. You’ll grow old. Listen, the mayor is speaking at the Salvation Army Christmas luncheon at the Hyatt today. I understand that the baked chicken is to die for.”

“Any chance you’ll be stalking the mayor along with me?”

“You can bet on it.”

Mason’s first stop was the Jackson County Jail, a redbrick building on the east side of police headquarters. The exterior was perforated by longitudinal rows of rectangular windows big enough to satisfy court-mandated quality-of-incarceration living standards and small enough to make certain the inmates stayed there to enjoy them.

The receptionist was a civilian employee who wore olive slacks and a pale blue shirt with epaulets on the shoulders to give the ensemble an official appearance. Her bleached blond hair was pulled back tight enough to raise her chin to her lower lip, freezing her mouth in a scowl, though she might have just made an awful face as a child and it froze that way.

According to the tag on her blouse, her name was Margaret. He rejected the likelihood of a conspiracy by the World Federation of Margarets to make his life miserable but clenched his smart-ass impulse just in case.

“Good morning,” he told Margaret. “I’m Lou Mason and I’m here to see my client, Wilson Bluestone.”

He handed her his driver’s license, his Missouri Bar Association membership card, and one of his business cards.

Margaret scanned Mason’s card collection like a bouncer checking for fake IDs. “You didn’t sign the back of your bar card. I can’t accept it without a signature,” she said, handing the bar card back to Mason.

Mason felt the first wave of intemperance ripple through his back and neck. He resisted the urge to vault the counter separating them and smiled instead.

“Of course. Sorry about that,” he said as he signed his name and handed the card back to her.

Margaret held the bar card alongside Mason’s driver’s license, comparing the two signatures like a Treasury agent looking for counterfeit twenties.

“Bar card is expired. Can’t take an expired bar card. You should have paid your dues.”

She handed the bar card back to Mason. He gripped the counter with both hands to keep them from her throat and decided to appeal to her sense of reason.

“Margaret, consider what you’re saying. The bar card only means that I’m a member of the Missouri bar. It’s a form of identification. There’s nothing in the law that requires me to belong to the bar association or even be a lawyer to visit an inmate. Now, it happens that I am a lawyer and I have a client who’s locked in a cell upstairs who is entitled to the effective representation of his chosen counsel. If he’s deprived of that representation because you won’t let me see him, the judge will have to dismiss the charges. My client happens to have been charged with murder, which most people think is a pretty serious deal. So why don’t you call the prosecuting attorney and tell him that his case is going to get dismissed because you, Margaret, are refusing to let me see my client because my bar card has expired?”

“Jeez. Are you a tight-ass or what? I’m just doing my job here. Pay your damn dues like everybody else.”

“Trust me, Margaret. I’ve paid my dues. Now, open up.”

Mason passed through a series of security checks that fell one pat down short of a body-cavity search and was ushered into a cramped room divided by a narrow countertop that served as a table. A reinforced double pane of glass cut the room completely in two. A circular metal screen was mounted in the glass, which allowed conversation to be heard on both sides.

Mason stood, pacing in the small room until Blues entered through a door on the inmates’ side. They looked at each other for a full minute. Mason saw a defiant man, ramrod straight, ragged coal black hair hanging over his tawny brow, piercing eyes searching Mason for good news. Blues touched his closed fist to the glass, holding it there, Mason returning the gesture.

“They’re going to offer you a deal.”

“I won’t take it.”

“I know that.”

“How do you know they’re going to offer me a deal?”

Mason couldn’t tell Blues what had happened in the parking lot. If Blues knew that taking a deal would protect Mason, he might agree. Mason assumed that whoever had sent him the message was counting on his relationship with Blues as one more source of pressure that would bring this case to a quick conclusion.

“Patrick Ortiz invited me to his office to talk about it. I turned down the invitation. Are you ready to ride this thing out?”

“All the way. I’m innocent and I’m not going to let somebody railroad me. Besides, no matter how many of them there are, you and me got them outnumbered.”

Mason smiled at the vote of confidence. “This case is hot and it’s going to get hotter. You watch yourself in there.”

Blues chuckled. “Man, you forget one thing. All those brothers and white-trash crackers in there are afraid this crazy Indian will scalp ‘em in their sleep. No one is going to fuck with me. Not more than once.”

“Be cool, Blues. The case they’ve got against you isn’t worth a shit. Don’t give them one they can make.”

“I hear that.”

They touched their fists against the glass again, and Mason pushed a button signaling the guard that they had finished their meeting.

When Mason got back to his office, he listened to a message from his aunt Claire telling him to meet her for lunch at the Summit Street Cafe at noon. It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. She wasn’t much for protocol.

Mason assumed that she wanted to talk about Blues’s case. If he was caught in the middle between Harry and Blues, she was caught between him and Harry. Though she wouldn’t see it that way. She was one of the few people Mason knew who meant it when she said, “Let the chips fall where they may.”

He had time until lunch so he searched the
Kansas City Star
‘s Web site for Rachel Firestone’s articles about Jack Cullan’s murder, noting that there had been three other murders during the same span, none of them getting the same coverage and none of them generating any fanfare or outrage. Mason knew why.

Kansas City knows murder. Any town that began as a river trading post called Old Possum Trot knows killing. Any town that claims Jesse James as a wayward son and commemorates the Union Station Massacre knows how to let the lead fly. Any town that has convulsed with riots and raised a generation of hopeless hard cases who expect to die before they’re twenty-five knows the sweet agony of death.

Put a million and a half people—white, black, brown, yellow, rich, poor, faithful, faithless, doped, dependent, and demanding—in the rolling river country of the heart of America and they’ll find endless ways to kill. Put it in the papers and on the news with candlelight vigils for the funerals of infants. Watch as TV reporters stick microphones in mourners’ faces asking how does it feel and the people will search themselves for shock while keeping a head count, a steady drumbeat of death, ahead or behind last year’s pace.

But take the life of a mover and a shaker, of one to whom it’s not supposed to happen, someone who holds all the cards, someone who gives more dispensations than the pope and holds more markers than the devil. Well, that’s showbiz. The mayor grieves the victim and denounces the guilty. The chief of police reassures an anxious community with a quick arrest, and the prosecuting attorney promises justice swift and certain.

Rachel Firestone reported it all. Her prose was concise, her tone neutral, and her facts straight. Only the headlines above the stories announced an agenda. They painted the crime, the victim, the accused, and the supporting cast with a broad brush dipped in sensational ink to capture mind share and market share in a media-saturated world.
Kingpin Murdered
, screamed the headline in Tuesday’s paper. Wednesday’s lead promised
Police Close to Arrest
, and Thursday’s paper trumpeted
Ex-Cop Arrested for Murder of Political Boss
.