[Lou Mason 01.0] Motion to Kill

by Joel Goldman

  “Yeah, the sheriff thinks I killed Sullivan instead of suing him for libel. Don’t worry, though. I’ve got a terrific defense.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Someone tried to kill me on the way back from the lake.”

  Scott dropped his empty beer bottle. The glass shattered on the brick patio. “You’re shitting me!”

  “Maybe. I don’t know for certain. I was on Highway 5, trying to pass a guy in a black Escalade. This asshole held me out in the other lane until I was about to hit a truck head-on. I swerved off the road at the last second, or there would be two openings at the firm.”

  “You think there was a connection?”

  “If Sullivan was murdered, his death is probably linked to O’Malley. At least, I can’t think of anything else that could get him killed. I’m defending O’Malley. Sullivan tried to get me to destroy incriminating evidence. I refused. Sullivan set me up. Someone tried to kill me and make my death look like an accident. It makes as much sense as anything else.”

  “Did you report it to the cops?”

  “Not yet. I’ll tell the sheriff, but she’ll probably think I’m making it up. I didn’t get the license number of the guy who hung me out in the wrong lane. I can’t prove it even happened.”

  Scott listened, nodding without agreeing. “I know this sounds trivial in comparison, but if St. John really wants to put pressure on the firm, he’ll ask the court to freeze all our assets. They don’t need a conviction to do that.”

  “You’re right. I remember reading about a New York firm that got caught in an insider-trading scandal. The feds got an order freezing their assets and the firm disappeared overnight. Last one out the door turned off the lights. Any suggestions?”

  “We’ve got to get out in front on this. Harlan will be overly cautious, too protective. We need someone to investigate the firm’s exposure and get St. John to back off until we figure out what’s going on.”

  Mason knew that Scott was right. Harlan was perfect for recruiting clients, but he was a conscientious objector to trench warfare. If St. John was coming after the firm, it would be a bloody fight.

  “That’ll require outside counsel.”

  “Bad choice. We’d never be able to control it. You’ve got to do it. You’re new enough to the firm that you’ll have credibility with St. John. You can offer him the dear, departed Sullivan and save the rest of our asses.”

  Mason wondered if the bottom of his beer bottle could explain how a simple weekend at the lake had managed to turn into such a nightmare. He was the wrong choice. This battle required someone totally committed to the firm. He wasn’t.

  “Listen, I hate to pile on the bad news, but I don’t plan to be around long enough to handle this case.”

  Scott stared at Mason, eyes narrowed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I decided to quit when Sullivan asked me to destroy evidence.”

  “So what! Sullivan’s dead, and you didn’t destroy any evidence. That’s bullshit!”

  “Not to me. O’Malley’s case is a tar baby that I’m not going to get stuck with. Besides, I’m going to try to get Tommy Douchant a new trial. The firm turned that case down. I’ve got to do it on my own.”

  “Tommy’s case is a loser. You already lost it once. Don’t waste more time on it.”

  Mason bristled at Scott’s slam. “It’s not a loser if I dig up evidence that will get Tommy a new trial. I owe him that much.”

  “What about what you owe me? I got you this job. You’ve got a year to file a motion for a new trial. It’s been, what, four months since Tommy’s trial? You’ve got eight months left. I need you now.”

  “You need someone from outside the firm, someone who’s objective. Someone who won’t be a suspect if it turns out that Sullivan was murdered.”

  “Wrong. I need someone I can trust. If Sullivan was killed, who’s going to work harder to clear your name and mine? You or some hired gun that’s got a dozen other cases he’s got to keep track of? Besides, I’ll make certain the firm lets you reopen Tommy’s case.”

  Mason sometimes made poor choices when people made him feel like a badly needed, ungrateful shit. The last one had required a divorce to correct it.

  “Okay. Let’s see what happens in the morning,” Mason hedged. It was a half promise Scott would make him honor.

  He walked Scott to the front door and said good night. Closing it behind him, he stood in the front hall and looked to his right at the portraits of his great-grandparents—Aunt Claire’s grandparents—on the dining room wall. Tobiah and Hinda Sackheim had immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in 1871. Tobiah, ignorant of English, couldn’t tell the immigration official his name. Somehow, he explained that he was a stonemason, and the Sackheims of Lithuania became the Masons of Ellis Island.

  From their perch on the wall, they guarded the silver candlesticks they had brought with them to America. Claire kept the candlesticks on the dining room table and, when Mason was little, she lit them each year at Passover and told him the story of the Jews’ Exodus from Egypt.

  Both stories, one of his people and one of his family, fed her passion for justice and had once fired his own. The flame still burned brightly for Aunt Claire but was little more than a flicker for him. Mason stared at the candlesticks and replayed the memories, searching for a spark he didn’t find.

  He returned to the patio, picked up the pieces of Scott’s broken bottle, and lay down in the lounge chair. He watched the moonrise as his eyelids fell, wondering if sleeping on patio furniture was a sign of the early onset of dementia. He was jolted awake by the cordless telephone. Blinking, he focused on his watch. It was nearly midnight.

  “Yeah?”

  “Sorry if I woke you.” Kelly Holt sounded too cheerful for the end of a long day.

  “That’s all right. I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.”

  Long pause. He couldn’t believe his evil twin, the high school freshman, invaded his body every time he talked to this woman.

  “Will you be in your office tomorrow? There are a few things I need to ask you about.” She was all business and not interested in bonding through teenage humor.

  “Sure. We’ve got a partners’ meeting at eight that may go all morning. The afternoon will be crazy talking with clients. How about five o’clock—my office?”

  “Fine.”

  “Any news?”

  “Just one thing. Your partner was murdered.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MASON QUIT HIS OLD FIRM, Forrest, Mason, & Goldberg, a week after Tommy Douchant’s trial ended. Tommy worked construction until one sun-drenched spring morning when the hook on his safety belt broke, bouncing him off steel I beams onto the pavement two stories below. Paraplegics don’t work construction. Mason sued the safety-belt manufacturer, Philpott Safety Systems, and lost.

  Tommy’s case should have been settled, but he turned down two million dollars the day before the trial started. Mason told him to take it. He found out the day after the trial that his partner, Stephen Forrest, had met secretly with Tommy and convinced him to turn the offer down. Forrest didn’t care that Mason had a tough case. He wanted to ride Tommy’s broken back to a bigger payday and his share of a fatter fee.

  Tommy’s case wasn’t the first one Forrest had sabotaged. Mason told him that he wasn’t quitting because of the money; it was the lack of trust. It was like coming home and finding his wife in bed with someone else—again. It was the “again” part that Mason couldn’t handle. Mason called Scott, and a week later he was the new gun in Sullivan & Christenson’s litigation department.

  His old firm was a six-person shop specializing in representing injured people.

  “It’s half a practice,” Claire told him.

  “How can you say that? We help the little guy, the person who can’t afford to take on the big corporations on their own.”

  “Yes, you help the outnumbered. But it’s all about the money, not nob
le causes. Every time I see a plaintiff’s lawyer in a thousand-dollar suit driving a hundred-thousand-dollar car and living in a million-dollar house, I want to kick him right in his jackpot.”

  She’d been no fonder of Sullivan & Christenson. “That kind of firm has more rules than people,” she’d cautioned Mason when he told her he was changing firms. “You’re not cut out to join the army. Anybody can do what they do. Besides, there’s no honor in stealing one thief’s money back from another.”

  “Even a heartless corporation deserves a good lawyer,” Mason said.

  “But you’re wrong for the job. You’re not heartless. And that’s the brutal truth.”

  Claire claimed all her truths were brutal or they weren’t worth believing. Mason tried convincing himself that he took the job with Sullivan & Christenson for the change of scenery. The brutal truth was that he took it because he thought it was safer. He could live with stealing one thief’s money back from another more easily than he could live with another Tommy Douchant. In the last three days he’d discovered that Claire was right. There was nothing safe and easy at Sullivan & Christenson.

  Mason wondered how much of the firm’s business for heartless corporations would be left after Sullivan’s death as he cinched his navy and red tie beneath the collar of his white shirt and slipped on a gray suit. It was the lawyer’s uniform. Appropriate for partners’ meetings, funerals, and circumcision ceremonies. Today promised to roll elements of all three into one festive occasion.

  Scott Daniels and Harlan Christenson were waiting for him in his office.

  “Harlan and I want to go over a few things with you before the meeting,” Scott said.

  Harlan’s face sagged under his silence. He had the connections that got the firm started. Sullivan had the backbone that made it a powerhouse. Without Sullivan, Harlan was lost.

  “Before we get to that,” Mason said, “the sheriff investigating Sullivan’s death called me late last night. She said Sullivan was murdered.”

  Harlan muttered, “Dear God,” and shrank farther into his chair. “How?” It was all he could manage.

  “She didn’t say.”

  “What’s next?” Scott asked.

  “She’s coming here this afternoon to ask me some more questions. That’s all I know.”

  “Why is she so interested in you?” Scott asked.

  “How should I know? Either she thinks I did it or she can’t resist my boyish charms.”

  Scott studied him for a moment. “Then we’d better focus on what we do know. I came in early this morning to get a look at the files the grand jury subpoenaed. Quintex Land Corporation was at the top of the list.”

  Mason said, “I thought Quintex was the company O’Malley used for his real estate deals. St. John is after him for bank fraud, not real estate fraud. What’s the connection?”

  “I don’t know. Quintex has been around a long time, and a lot of assets have passed through it.”

  “Did O’Malley use Quintex for anything else?”

  “A few years ago, he started using it for other investments.”

  “Were the deals clean?”

  “Sullivan handled the real estate deals. I don’t know about them. I handled the investments. They were all cash deals. No banks involved. St. John can’t be interested in those.”

  “Maybe one of the other partners knows something that might explain some of this.”

  “We have to tell them about the subpoena, but I don’t think we should put the details on the table yet. For now, we’d better keep this among ourselves. Harlan agrees with me.”

  Steady breathing was Harlan’s way of saying yes.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE ELEVEN REMAINING PARTNERS of Sullivan & Christenson assembled in the firm’s south conference room on the thirty-second floor of the Grand Street Pavilion, an O’Malley Development Co. project, financed by O’Malley’s Mid-States Savings & Loan and managed by O’Malley Properties. Sullivan insisted that the firm not exceed the developer’s allowance for tenant improvements. “Wallpaper won’t make you money,” was his explanation. In this case he was right. Leasing from the firm’s biggest client at market rates kept O’Malley happy by filling his building. There was no need to add to the expense.

  The conference room, like the rest of the two floors the firm occupied, was finished in a nondescript blend of taupe, mauve, and teal hues woven through the carpet, woodwork, and grass-cloth wallpaper. Equally generic art decorated space that could be quickly vacated for new tenants. Twelve chairs surrounded the conference table, five to a side and one at each end.

  Lawyers are pack animals with a clear pecking order reflected in office assignments and seats at conference tables. Mason had inherited a seat on the side with a view out the windows. Harlan took his customary seat at the far end of the table. Mason wondered if anyone would adjust the pecking order by claiming Sullivan’s vacant chair at the head of the table opposite Harlan. Grabbing it too soon could send someone to the back of the pack.

  Scott was the last to arrive and, without breaking stride, landed in Sullivan’s chair, dropped a sheaf of papers in front of him, and looked around the table.

  “Okay, Harlan, the day’s gonna be a bitch, so let’s get started.”

  Harlan described what was known of Sullivan’s death, omitting that he had been murdered. Mason attributed the omission to Harlan’s innate avoidance of unpleasant news. Harlan spoke of his shock, his sympathy for Pamela, announced that the funeral would be Wednesday at one p.m. at the Ward Parkway Episcopal Church, and turned the meeting over to Scott. The partners swiveled their heads in unison to the other end of the table.

  “Harlan and I will contact Sullivan’s clients and reassure them that their matters are being taken care of. Call any of your key clients who should be personally informed. Everyone else will receive a letter that should go out by the end of the day.”

  Mason was surprised that Scott also didn’t disclose that Sullivan had been murdered. He wondered if Scott and Harlan would rather the partners read about it in the newspaper.

  “Has anyone spoken to O’Malley?” asked one of the partners.

  “He’ll be here at eleven to meet with me, Scott, and Lou,” Harlan said.

  Scott pressed ahead before Mason could remind him that he hadn’t agreed to stick around.

  “That’s going to be a tough meeting,” Scott added. “I found out yesterday that Sullivan and the firm are now targets of the grand jury investigation into O’Malley. The firm’s files have been subpoenaed for this Friday.”

  “How did you find out, Scott? Was that the surprise in your box of Cracker Jacks?” Sandra Connelly asked.

  Sandra joined the firm as a partner a year before Mason did and was chair of the litigation department. She had been less than enthusiastic about hiring him. Scott told Mason that Sandra didn’t think an ambulance-chasing lawyer was corporate litigation material. Scott told Mason not to worry about her opposition. She had the title but none of the power and didn’t want the competition. She took her frustration out on Mason by alternating verbal jabs with a sterile indifference accentuated by calling him Louis, something no one had done since the third grade.

  Sandra blended hard edges and soft touches. Her shoulder-length hair was the color of maple leaves in the fall. She had hazel eyes, high porcelain cheeks, and you-know-how-to-whistle-don’t-you lips with a body to match. She’d made more than a few opposing lawyers want to thank her for slicing open their jugular.

  Mason invited her to lunch during his first week at the firm. It was like the Arab-Israeli peace talks. No one spoke the same language. Scott told him that she’d never been married, didn’t need the money she made, and was lethal in the courtroom.

  Mason and Sandra hadn’t worked on any cases together. He wanted to break through her refrigerated demeanor just to make her stop calling him Louis and because he considered her hostility a challenge to his natural charm.

  Scott answered Sandra without looking at h
er. “I found a target letter from Franklin St. John and the subpoena in Sullivan’s desk.”

  “You mean Sullivan kept this secret from the rest of us but just happened to leave the subpoena and St. John’s letter lying around on his desk for the cleaning crew to read?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Sandra,” he answered, now looking at her. “I was looking for Sullivan’s drafts of my closing documents when I ran across them. Now one of us has to deal with the U.S. attorney. Lou will be seen as the least tainted since he’s only been here a few months. I think he should handle it. Harlan, what do you think?”

  “Excuse me,” Sandra interrupted. “His name is Lou Mason, not Perry Mason. Would you like to know what the head of the litigation department thinks about putting the future of this firm into the hands of a lawyer whose idea of a courtroom victory is selling a rear-end collision whiplash sob story? To say nothing of the verdict he got for his best friend in his last trial.”

  Mason felt everyone’s eyes burning holes into him while waiting to see if he got up off the mat after Sandra’s body slam. His were on her. She didn’t flinch. Trouble was, angry as he was, she wasn’t wrong. Vicious, yes. Wrong, probably not. That was the nature of brutal truth. Had she known Mason was quitting, she would have thrown him out the window. Scott saved him from having to respond.

  “As a matter of fact, Sandra, what you think is not the subject of this discussion. The people who built this firm will make these decisions. Lou is the right choice.”

  “Sound judgment, Scott,” Harlan added. “Lou, get started today. Sandra will cover your docket and reassign anything that’s in need of immediate attention. You’ll have our complete cooperation. Just get it done.”

  Bugging out now was not an option. Mason wouldn’t let Scott down and give Sandra the satisfaction of thinking she was right.

  “Not a problem. I’ll take care of my other cases. That’s why I get the middle money. But I’ll need help on this.”

  “Sure, Lou. I’ll back you up on the corporate side,” Scott said.