Deadlocked (Lou Mason Thrillers)

by Joel Goldman

  She was wearing slacks and a blouse that passed for business casual during a heat wave, the blouse open at the throat, veins in her neck taut against her skin. Mason looked up, forgetting that he'd told her to meet him at his office.

  Dead jurors and missing clients had suddenly become nuisances, as had Sandra's appearance on his doorstep. The meaning of the accident report sliced through Mason. "Intentional," the investigating police officer had concluded, meaning that Mason's father had driven through a guard rail and into a ravine on purpose, the only possible purpose being to kill himself and Mason's mother.

  For a moment, he didn't blame Claire for not telling him. Nothing she could have said would have softened the blow. She cast life's harsh realities as the brutal truth, shielding her clients from things that would only curse them, no matter how true they were. That's what she'd done for him.

  In the next instant, he rejected her, resenting her for cutting him off from a truth he couldn't have imagined. The man that had given him life had taken his own life and his mother's. The fantasy images he'd conjured as a boy of his grand and glorious pop haunted him in a flash of humiliation.

  The scar on Mason's chest tightened, like he was being stabbed again, only this time from the inside out. He slipped his hand between the buttons of his shirt, massaging the scar.

  "Lou," Sandra said. "Are you all right? I've seen CEOs doing the perp walk that looked better than you do."

  Mason folded the pages of the accident report, and put them in the top drawer of his desk. He was burning up, flushed with shock, anger, and shame. The obvious questions banged inside his head, making him dizzy. How could his father do such a thing? What had happened between his parents? What did it mean for him all these years later?

  He took a bottle of water from the refrigerator behind his desk, and drank half of it, stalling for time. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to Sandra, or anyone else.

  "It's the heat," he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, tasting the sweat. "I know you wanted to get together, but something's come up. I'll give you a call in the morning. We'll have lunch."

  Sandra crossed the room, standing on the other side of the desk. She clutched the strap of the purse strung over her shoulder like it was a ripcord on a parachute, her other hand palm down on the desk, steadying herself. The tremors at the corners of her mouth looked like fault lines.

  She shook her head. "Whatever you just shoved into that drawer will have to wait until morning. We need to talk now."

  Mason took a deep breath. His parents had died forty years ago. Sandra was in trouble or headed there in a hurry. That was plain. Putting her and his clients on hold while he figured out what had possessed his father wouldn't bring his parents back. He could leave the accident report in his drawer and never take it out again. Or he could try to make sense of it. What he did about his parents and when he did it wouldn't change a thing. Besides, from the look of her Sandra wasn't going anywhere.

  "Okay," he told her. "You called this meeting. What's so important?"

  "Whitney King has agreed to meet with you."

  "Alone?" Mason asked.

  Sandra swallowed. "Yes. I'll be there, but in another room."

  Mason finished his bottle of water. "Why didn't he take your advice and tell me to pound sand?"

  "Because he's got more testosterone than sense. Going one-on-one with you appeals to his puerile instincts. He wants to do it tonight at his office," she said, coming as close to begging as he'd ever heard her.

  Sandra carried a knife in her purse. Unlike a lot of women who carried weapons for self-protection, she knew how to use it and wouldn't hesitate. She didn't rattle easily, but she was barely able to stop from shaking.

  "You don't have to represent him," Mason said. "You know that. You can quit. Let him find someone else."

  "I don't quit, Lou. You know that. Besides, Whitney has a certain charm that comes from having enough money to get into enough trouble to make getting him out of it worthwhile," she said.

  "Then why do you look more swept away than swept off your feet? And why were you checking up on my missing client after giving me the lecture on ethics?"

  "I didn't break any rules," she snapped. "Mary wasn't home. If she had been, I would have told her to call you."

  "But you had to see for yourself, didn't you?" Mason asked her.

  "Yeah," Sandra answered. "I always do and sometimes I don't like what I see. Let's get going. I'll drive. I'm parked in front."

  Chapter 27

  Mason followed Sandra through the club. Blues was back behind the bar, polishing a glass, listening to a guy on a stool spin a story, watching them pass. Mason met his look, both of them wearing masks. Blues poured his customer a drink, not spilling a drop, not taking his eyes from Mason's back until the door closed behind him.

  Sandra pulled out into traffic and whipped around a driver that had slowed down in front of the Uptown Theatre, an art deco remnant from the fifties with a wraparound marquee above the doors. Mason had gone there as a kid to watch monster movies. It had been rehabbed into a venue for rock bands, Bar Mitzvah parties, and book signings, one of each advertised for the coming week.

  Sandra was dodging traffic and Mason's questions. He wasn't going for a ride with her without pushing harder for answers.

  "Eight of the twelve jurors who acquitted Whitney are dead," Mason said. "One was named Sonni Efron. She was shot in the face last week. Frances Peterson was another one.

  She was shot in the face today. Dress it up all you want, Sandra. Whitney's a bad man and you know it."

  She gave him a sharp glance that said she'd considered the possibility enough to worry about it. "You think he's bad enough to kill the people who acquitted him?"

  "I do," Mason said. "Especially if he fixed the jury and didn't want anyone to find out."

  "Whitney was seventeen years old when the trial took place," she said, the words a last plea with herself, not an argument with him.

  "So he was a child prodigy," Mason said.

  Sandra slipped through traffic, winding through the shops and restaurants on the Plaza. She stopped for a string of tourists crossing the street aiming for the Cheesecake Factory, gunning her Lexus past the last straggler. Someone pulled out of a parking space on Ward Parkway along Brush Creek. Sandra cut off another driver to snag the spot. She got out of the car, slammed her door, and walked to the edge of the creek, arms folded over her heaving chest.

  Brush Creek was a quiet canal, broad grassy banks sloping up to the street on either side. The Plaza was on the north shore, its Spanish-inspired architecture and outdoor sculpture lending a cosmopolitan backdrop. Postwar brownstone apartment buildings converted into condos lined the south shore. People jogged on paths alongside the water, ignoring the heat. Gondolas floated past, carrying passengers who had nothing better to do with twenty-five dollars. The last fingers of sunlight laid golden tracks on the water.

  "Daniel Boone trapped beaver on this creek in the early eighteen hundreds," Mason said, standing at Sandra's shoulder. "Can you believe that? Tom Pendergast paved it with concrete in the ninteen thirties. Some people think he tossed a few of his political opponents into the cement before it dried."

  "You'd make a great tour guide," Sandra told him, biting her lip, not looking at him.

  "I can't help you if you don't talk to me," Mason told her.

  Sandra turned to face him, her hand on his cheek, a quiver rippling along her jaw. "Good old Lou," she said. "You'll be using that line on women until you're too old to remember why."

  Mason took her by the wrist, pulling her hand away. "If it's about Mary, where she is, what's happened to her, you've got to tell me."

  "I don't know anything about Mary," she said, sticking her hands under her arms, studying Mason, arguing with herself, giving in. "Look, my firm represented Whitney and his family for a long time before I was hired. I spent the weekend reviewing the family files."

  "You need to get a
life," Mason told her with a teasing smile.

  "I know you, Lou. You're going to sue Whitney and you're going to dig up every rock the family laid down before and after Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes were murdered. I was just getting ready."

  "What did you find?"

  She raked her fingers through her hair, tugging on the ends. "The more money a family has, the more twisted things get. I may have tumbled onto something that puts me in a very bad spot."

  Despite what many people assumed, lawyers are governed by complex ethical rules that try to balance more than one right thing at a time. A lawyer can't disclose a prior crime by a client revealed in confidence but must disclose a client's intent to commit a crime in the future. If disclosing the future crime would reveal the prior crime, things get complicated. If the disclosures could get you killed, survival becomes more important than ethics. Mason read Sandra's dilemma in the flutter of her eyes.

  "Whitney's past runs all the way to the present," Mason said gently, "and you can't cut one off from the other."

  She nodded, adding, "It's not just Whitney."

  Sandra's cell phone rang. She took it off the clip on her belt, answering and listening. Her chin was on her chest, her shoulders slack. "Okay. I understand," she said with a grim voice. She closed the phone and started toward her car. "Come on," she added over her shoulder. "We're late."

  "Was that Whitney?" Mason asked, barely closing his door before Sandra was back in traffic.

  "No. It was Dixon Smith. He's a former federal prosecutor who's on his own now. We're representing defendants in the same case," she answered, keeping her eyes straight ahead, enforcing a brittle calm.

  "Okay," Mason said. "Let's get back to Whitney and his family's files."

  She tossed her head as if she was shaking off the tremors, giving him a weak smile. "Later," she said. "Let's see how it goes with Whitney."

  Mason couldn't tell whether she was concentrating on the cars in front of her or whether she just didn't want to look him in the eye when she lied to him. Mason knew Dixon Smith, had banged heads against him when he was in the U.S. attorney's office. Smith usually defended people accused of violent crimes, leaving the white-collar variety to lawyers like Sandra. Sandra's lie was that Dixon had called her about another case. She was about to tell Mason what she had found in the King family files until Dixon called.

  Sandra continued south, cutting east a few blocks then south again on Holmes Road, an artery that would take them to Whitney's office some fifty blocks away.

  "Why is Whitney working late? Just to talk to me?" Mason asked.

  "Hard as it may be to believe, he might prefer that to going home to a big empty house."

  "Where does the lonely rich boy live?"

  "Burning Oak, that new golf course project in Lenexa," Sandra answered.

  The metropolitan area was bifurcated by the state line between Kansas and Missouri, wealth accumulating in a string of cities that ran together in Johnson County on the Kansas side. Lenexa was one of them, wedged into the western part of the county. Burning Oak offered golf course lots priced at a quarter million on which buyers could build a house for a million-five more and lay down fifty grand to join the country club.

  "So what's he doing at the office? Counting his money or stalking jurors?"

  Sandra banged her hand on the steering wheel. "Damn it, Lou! Give it a rest!"

  He did, keeping his mouth shut the rest of way, his thoughts staggering back to his parents, shredding fabricated images of their lives while Sandra parked outside Whitney's office building. She didn't move for a moment, finally turning the ignition off and taking a deep breath.

  "Okay, then," she said. "This is it."

  The parking lot was empty, no sign of Whitney's car. Mason assumed there was underground parking or that Whitney had parked on another side of the building, which was one of several in an office park ringed by mature trees with a jogging path laid among them. Park benches and picnic tables were scattered along the outer wall of greenery.

  The building was ten stories, packaged in reflecting glass that made it impossible to see inside. It was past nine o'clock, dark, and no one was working late. They were at the entrance to the building when Sandra's cell phone rang again.

  "Yes," she said, pausing. "Hello, Whitney. We're outside your building now. Where are you?" Mason tried the door, jiggling it so Sandra could tell that it was locked. "We're locked out," she said. "How long before you'll get here? Fine. We'll wait."

  "What's the story?" Mason asked as Sandra stowed the phone and looked around.

  "His mother is in a nursing home. He took her out for dinner and has to take her home. He'll be here in about twenty minutes and he wants us to wait. Let's try the bench over there," she said, pointing to one in the shade of the trees lining the jogging path.

  "I thought she was in a psychiatric facility," Mason said.

  "It's both, really," Sandra said. "Nice place for crazy old people. They have an Alzheimer's unit. Whitney says his mother has a reservation."

  The bench was made of a forgiving heavy plastic or light metal. Mason couldn't tell which, only that it was more comfortable than it looked. They sat for a moment, Mason picking out stars. He turned to Sandra.

  "You remember the first case we worked on together?" he asked her.

  "Hard to forget," she said. "Both of us almost got killed."

  "Because we didn't trust each other," he reminded her. "Let's not make the same mistake again."

  Sandra pivoted toward him, tucking one leg under the other. "I do trust you," she said, her mouth opening wide at the same instant he felt something sharp and hot pierce the back of his shirt. Her scream was swallowed by his as a jolt of electricity fired a paralyzing spasm through his body.

  Mason tried to turn but couldn't make his muscles respond. He was suddenly aware of someone standing behind him, feeling a hand on his shoulder, smelling something familiar, his brain not processing the odor. Seconds unfolded in slow motion.

  Sandra raised her hands in front of her face. An earsplitting crack from a gun rocked him as her hands flew away and her face exploded in a spray of blood and bone. Her body splayed across the bench. The shooter grabbed Mason's right hand, wrapped it around the gun, and laced Mason's finger against the trigger with his own, firing the gun again, another burst of blood flowering from Sandra's chest.

  Sensation oozed back into his limbs, his movements slow, like he was swimming in molasses. He struggled against the gun that now inched upward across his chest, the hot barrel searing his neck, pressing hard beneath his chin. His hand was more jelly than muscle. His finger was still looped around the trigger, pulling it back against his will, about to leave him a dead puppet when his hand and the gun suddenly dropped in his lap and a hard shove put him on the ground in a heap.

  He opened his eyes, rolling over on his back, staring up at Sandra's body. He heard footsteps, someone running toward him. He tried to cry out but couldn't make a sound. He tried to get up, collapsing when his legs refused to move, thrashing his head against the next assault.

  Strong hands slipped beneath his shoulders, scooping him up, framing his face, holding him until he stopped shaking.

  "I've got you, man," Blues said.

  Chapter 28

  Mason sat in a patrol car in the parking lot less than a hundred feet from where Sandra Connelly's body lay draped across the park bench. The center of her face was a bloody, pulpy mush, the bullet ripping through her hands, barely slowing. Her neck lay at an uneasy angle across the top edge of the bench, her head dangling off the back, blank eyes turned to heaven. Her arms were spread, one leg still tucked beneath the other; the blood pooling from her chest wound dripped onto her lap.

  A cop sat next to him, another in the front seat, neither of them talking. His shirt was splattered with Sandra's blood. He reached over his shoulder to a sore spot above his left shoulder blade, the skin irritated, his shirt torn. Petty wounds. He'd regained his coordination within minut
es of Blues's arrival. He tried to explain what had happened, but Blues told him to save it.

  Mason understood why. Blues had been a cop long enough to size up a murder scene and this one looked simple. Sandra was dead, shot to death with a gun that Blues found next to Mason. Mason was the obvious suspect and Blues didn't want to be forced to testify to anything Mason told him.

  "Let the cops figure it out for now," Blues had told him. "You'll have plenty of time to tell me about it. Get your head straight and keep your mouth shut."

  Samantha Greer and her partner, Al Kolatch, were running the scene. Samantha gave him one look, the pain in her eyes like another gunshot. He was standing in the parking lot surrounded by three cops when she arrived while two others interviewed Blues.

  "You want to tell me about this?" she asked him.

  "Later," he said.

  She bit the inside of her cheek, pointing to two of the cops. "Put him in a car and keep him there. And no visitors, especially that one," she said, pointing at Blues who was talking to Kolatch.

  Forensic cops searched the area under the glare of bright lights set up to illuminate the scene. They shot video, took still photographs, scraped blood, tissue, and bone from the bench and the ground. They scoured the area for bullets, fingerprints, and footprints. They measured distances and angles, building a case against Sandra's killer. The coroner arrived, examined Sandra's body, giving a silent signal when he was finished. An ambulance crew slipped her body into a black zippered bag, then quietly left the scene.

  Samantha motioned to the cop in the backseat to trade places with her. "You want a lawyer or do you want to talk to me?"

  Mason didn't blame her for treating him like a suspect, but he was innocent. Blues had given him the same advice he would have given any client, even though he knew that silence could be as incriminating as any confession. He had a lot to explain, but nothing to hide.

  "I don't need a lawyer and I know my rights. You can put that thing away," he said as she took her Miranda card from her purse.