Lou Mason Mystery - 02 - The Last Witness (2 page)

“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.

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.

“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 on 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.”

“Harry playing good cop with you is—”

“Stupid. Ryman’s done everything but put a bounty on my ass, and he thinks he’s gonna talk me into confessing because he’s such a damn nice guy. Bullshit.”

“What do they have on you?”

Blues leaned over the oak table that separated him from Mason, planting both hands firmly on the surface.

“First things first. Can you do this?”

“What do you mean, can I do this? You’ve seen the law license hanging in my office. I’m an official member of the bar. Murder cases are a walk in the park. Besides, at the rate I’m charging you, I can’t afford to take long to get you off. I’ll go broke.”

Blues didn’t laugh or smile. His face was a death mask. “I’m not asking you about the lawyer piece. You’re as good as anybody I’ve ever seen. I want to know, can you do this?”

Mason understood the question. “Harry isn’t the issue. He’s not looking at the needle. You are.”

“Ryman doesn’t just think I killed Jack Cullan. He wants it to be me. Cops who want somebody found guilty know how to make that happen.”

“Not Harry. He’s hard. He probably does want it to be you, but Harry plays it straight. He doesn’t know any other way.”

“We get to court, Ryman’s on the stand—can you take him on, carve him up, make the jury want to blame him instead of me? Can you tell the jury that Harry Ryman doesn’t know his ass from third base and hates his old partner enough to send him to death row even if I’m innocent? Can you go home and tell your aunt Claire when all this is over that it was just business?”

Mason had asked himself the same questions as he drove downtown. Hearing Blues ask them reaffirmed the advice Harry had given him years ago. Knowing the right thing to do was easier than doing it. Since Harry was the lead on the investigation into Cullan’s murder, his testimony would have an enormous impact on the jury. Blues’s life might depend on Mason’s ability to turn the case into a trial of Harry and his investigation rather than a trial of Blues’s innocence.

Mason realized another troubling aspect of Blues’s questions. The criminal justice system was sometimes more about criminals than it was about justice. Innocent people were convicted for any number of reasons. Cops who planted evidence. Lazy defense lawyers. Jurors who believed that only guilty people got arrested, especially if they were black or brown. Being innocent wasn’t always enough.

That’s why nothing scared Mason more than an innocent client. The gangbanger, the embezzler, the jealous spouse turned killer, all knew in their gut that they’d do the time. They knew that after their lawyer turned every technical trick he had, the system would beat them. The odds favored the house.

Innocent people didn’t understand any of that. They were just innocent. End of story.

“I’ll do whatever it takes to beat this. Harry doesn’t expect anything less. He won’t cut either one of us any slack, and he’ll get none from me. Now, tell me what they’ve got on you.”

Blues hesitated a moment, then nodded and sat across from Mason.

“Jack Cullan came in the bar last Friday night, about nine o’clock.”

“You knew him?”

“He tried to hire me once. He wanted me to take pictures of a dude playing hide the nuts with the wrong squirrel. I took a pass.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Not long enough that he didn’t recognize me when he came in the bar. When he paid for the drinks, he told me that I should have taken the job since it paid better than bartending. I told him it didn’t pay better than bar owning.”

“Was he alone?”

“Opposite of alone. He was with a fine-looking woman, early forties, my guess.”

“Did you get her name?”

“Not at first. Before she left, she gave me her card. Her name was Beth Harrell.”

“As in Beth Harrell, the chair of the Missouri Gaming Commission?”

“Not likely that there’s more than one Beth Harrell who’d be out clubbing with Jack Cullan.”

“I can’t believe she was out anywhere with Cullan. They’ve been all over the front page of the
Star
. She’s got to be out of her mind to be out with that guy.”

“Maybe that’s why she threw a drink in his face.”

“Okay. You want to take this from the top or just play catch-the-zinger?”

“You’re the one asking the questions. I’m just the defendant.”

“Start talking or I’ll give you up to the public defender.”