[Lou Mason 01.0] Motion to Kill

by Joel Goldman

  Prior to the HIV diagnosis, Sullivan’s records were routine and uninteresting. His weight fluctuated between 150 and 160 pounds. His blood pressure was generally around 120/80. He never showed any signs of masses or lumps. His chest X-rays were clean. He rarely had a cold and had never been hospitalized in the twenty-two years that Morgenstern had been his doctor.

  An entry dated September 29, 1987, caught Mason’s eye—Sample drawn and delivered to Comm. B. B. The next entry was three days later and was written in physician shorthand that he could only partly decipher: TC from Dr. Ashland, Comm. B. B.—pt’s sample 95%+.

  “Kelly, what do you think this means?” Mason handed her the chart and pointed out the entries.

  She studied the entries, knitting her brow, double-checking for anything that would shed light on their meaning. The cabin resonated with the mixed scents of pine logs, remnants of breakfast, and musty upholstery. The potpourri couldn’t hide her fragrance. It was subtle, spicy, and elusive. He inhaled deeply and realized his last shower had been a day and a half ago. Not wanting to spoil the moment, he edged away from her.

  “The records don’t explain it,” she said.

  “Let me have a look,” Sandra said. “I used to spend half my time reading medical records. ‘Comm. B. B.’ is probably the community blood bank. My guess is they tested him for something and the results were ninety-five percent positive.”

  “Most doctors send their lab work out, but not to the community blood bank. Why would Morgenstern use them?” Mason asked.

  “Could be a lot of things, I guess; hepatitis, special blood counts, paternity. The easiest way to find out is to ask Charlie Morgenstern.”

  “I’ll make the call,” Kelly said. “In the meantime, Lou, do us all a favor and take a shower.”

  Mason coaxed a thin, lukewarm stream from the single-setting showerhead. Julio’s boot had left an angry inkblot on his left side. Raising his arm above his head, he peered at his side, examining the yellow and purple tinges that were forming in the blood pooled beneath his skin. He fingered the area gingerly, afraid to discover what fractured ribs were supposed to feel like. He was encouraged when his palpations didn’t produce shivers of pain.

  An odorless scrap of soap was stuck like a piece of gum on the underside of the soap dish. It yielded a pale film that was harder to rinse off than it was to scrub on. The total effect was like an economy car wash—one pass without the undercarriage blast. Putting yesterday’s clothes back on made the entire effort a break-even proposition. He was half clean, uncombed and unshaven, and starting to blend in with the logs.

  When he came back into the front room, Kelly and Blues were deep into the O’Malley papers. They had spread the summaries on the floor and were taking notes. Sandra was rereading Sullivan’s medical records.

  Kelly’s phone rang, interrupting the study group. She listened, said thank you, and hung up, smiling. This one was wide, toothy, and satisfied.

  “That was Dr. Morgenstern. Sullivan took a paternity test and passed. He’s a daddy.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  “SO WHO’S THE LUCKY HEIR?” Mason asked.

  “He doesn’t know. In 1987, some woman contacted Sullivan and claimed that he was the father of her ten-year-old child. Sullivan didn’t deny it but wanted a blood test to confirm it. Afterward, he never mentioned it again.”

  “Call the blood bank,” said Blues. “They keep their records forever.”

  “Forget it,” answered Sandra. “I’ve dealt with them on other cases. You won’t get anything out of them voluntarily. They’re too worried about confidentiality. You’ll need a court order.”

  “That’s what assistant prosecuting attorneys are for,” Kelly said.

  She grabbed her phone, punched in a number, and asked for Tina DeVoy, telling what she wanted and that she wanted it yesterday. Even though they could hear only one end of the conversation, it was easy enough to piece it together.

  DeVoy followed standard rank-and-file procedure, explaining why she couldn’t get the order before Monday and why it would take another week to get the records after she got the order.

  “Not good enough,” Kelly told her. “You’ll get the order, serve it, and bring me the records before the sun comes up in the morning or you’ll spend the rest of your career plea-bargaining traffic tickets. Are we clear?” Kelly listened and nodded. “Good. I’m sure you will.”

  “That prosecutor surely knows you aren’t her boss, doesn’t she?” Blues asked when Kelly hung up.

  “She’s brand-new and figures that anyone who yells at her might also sign her paycheck. She’ll get the order today, but we’ll be lucky to get the records before Monday. But at least it’s a start.”

  Sullivan’s blood tests triggered a memory from Tommy Douchant’s trial. Tommy’s hip was lacerated by one of the I beams he hit on his way down to the pavement. Mason had used his bloody clothes as trial exhibits.

  “How long will dried blood last?” he asked.

  “Why? Are you planning to start a collection?” Sandra asked.

  “Just trying to revive a lost cause. Any ideas, Kelly?”

  “There are too many variables to generalize. Depends on the surface, the temperature—a lot of things.”

  “Who would you use in Kansas City to analyze a safety hook for dried blood?”

  “Virginia Norville. She’s the county medical examiner, and she does freelance forensic work if it’s interesting enough.”

  Mason called Webb Chapman, leaving him a message to take the box of hooks to Dr. Norville for analysis. Sandra grabbed the phone as Mason was about to hang up, telling Chapman to also have the hooks checked for fingerprints.

  “Good enough,” Mason said. “Let’s see if we can figure anything out in the O’Malley records. The fixtures deals are the key. Quintex invested in a series of sale and leasebacks of store fixtures. Scott Daniels did all the legal work.”

  “Who signed off on the deals for the corporations?” Blues asked.

  “A Chicago law firm with power of attorney for the corporations. The real players are anonymous.”

  “What’s the name of the law firm?” Kelly asked.

  “Caravello and Landusky,” Mason said.

  The light drained from Kelly’s eyes as she grabbed Mason’s file and tore through the pages. Dropping the file, she balled her fists under her arms and paced around the room.

  “What’s the matter? It’s only a law firm. Did they turn you down for a job?”

  She stopped with her back to the stone fireplace, her expression grim. “Caravello and Landusky is Carlo D’lessandro’s personal law firm. They don’t sharpen their pencils unless it’s to cover for the mob. Jimmie Camaya has always been freelance, but D’lessandro is one of his best customers.”

  “What else do we know?” Blues asked.

  Mason answered. “Quintex invested fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand dollars in each deal. Annual rent was around sixty thousand. The first group of deals have recouped the initial investment and threw off about a half million dollars in the last year.”

  “Anything else?” Kelly asked.

  “In the last twelve months, O’Malley paid Sullivan & Christenson a half million dollars for work it never did.”

  “Who controlled the billing?” Kelly was boring in.

  “Angela Molina on the administrative side. She planted bugs in Sullivan’s, Harlan’s, and Scott’s offices to try and get something she could use on them.”

  “Where in the hell does that news come from, and when were you planning on telling me?”

  Kelly strapped her arms down with her hands to keep from strangling Mason. Blues just grinned, enjoying the show.

  Even Mason couldn’t believe that he hadn’t told them everything he’d found out. Then he remembered that he’d spent most of the time since he talked with Angela being beat up and shot at, hitting bad guys with toilets, and sneaking out of town in the back of a car. It was easy to forget petty stuff like blac
kmail, wiretapping, and fraud when he got caught up in the fun and excitement of dodging bullets. Still, he felt sheepish—well, actually, stupid, but he thought he could sell sheepish easier than stupid.

  “Okay, look. I’ve been kind of busy the last couple of days, what with being beat up, held prisoner, shot at, rescuing Sandra, and killing a guy. I know I should keep you guys more up to date, and I’ll try to do better from here on out.”

  Blues grimaced as if he had gas. Sandra stuck two fingers down her throat. Kelly wasn’t buying any of it. All he could do was finish the story.

  “Okay. Here it is. Angela and I had a drink at a gay bar called The Limit. She admitted the bugging and said the recordings were in a safe place. She was about to tell me where when Diane Farrell showed up.”

  “Sounds like somebody is laundering money through Quintex and the law firm,” Kelly said. “Probably drug money. We need to talk to someone who can tell us if the lease payments are way above market value. If they are, I’ll bet that’s how they’re washing the cash.”

  “Might be easier to trace the money after it leaves the law firm than try to backtrack it to where it started,” Blues said.

  “How do we do that?” Mason asked.

  “The first thing to do is examine the firm’s expenses. Are there any new, large expenses that aren’t easily explained? Do they match up in time with the receipt of the fees from O’Malley?” Kelly explained.

  “We’ll have to get into the firm’s records to figure that out. I doubt if Scott will just turn the books over to us,” Mason said.

  “That’s assuming he’s still running the show,” Sandra added. “Last we heard, the firm was the prize in a dogfight between St. John, with his federal court order freezing the firm’s assets, and O’Malley, with the receiver appointed by the state court.”

  “Don’t leave anything else out, Counselor,” Kelly said.

  “There is one other thing. Diane Farrell had Angela witness Sullivan’s codicil revoking his will, except Angela never saw Sullivan sign it.”

  “So we charge Angela with murder, wiretapping, and falsely witnessing a document. Great.” Kelly said.

  She picked up Mason’s file and started to return it to his briefcase when she hesitated, reached inside, and pulled out three CDs. “I thought you said you told us everything, Lou. What are these?”

  “Souvenirs from Sullivan,” Mason said. “Two porn DVDs and the Johnny Mathis CD that was in his briefcase when we searched his room at the lake. His wife didn’t want them, so I kept them.”

  “Why? You like a Johnny Mathis soundtrack with your porn?”

  “Yeah, the moaning and groaning get old after a while.”

  “Where did you find the porno DVDs?”

  “One of them was in Sullivan’s office and the other was at his house.”

  “Tell me again how you know that there isn’t anything else on them.”

  “Diane Farrell looked at them for us.”

  Kelly’s eyebrows rose with each word until Mason thought her forehead would vanish. He realized again how lame some things sounded when you tried to explain them to someone else.

  “This is the same Diane Farrell who told Angela to witness Sullivan’s codicil without Sullivan’s signature and who showed up just in time to stop Angela from telling you where she was hiding her wiretap tapes?” Kelly asked.

  Mason decided to treat her question as rhetorical.

  “Yeah,” Blues answered for him. “My money says these disks will get you more than a rise in your Levi’s.”

  Kelly picked up her phone again.

  “Riley, it’s Kelly. Meet me at the courthouse computer center as soon as you can, and be prepared to do some hacking.”

  “Who’s Riley?” Blues asked.

  “He’s the register of deeds,” Mason said.

  “And, he set up the county’s new computer system,” Kelly said. “If Sullivan hid something on these disks, he’ll find it. And, Lou, another shower wouldn’t hurt.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  “THERE’S GOT TO BE SOMETHING HIDDEN on those DVDs that will unravel this whole thing,” Kelly said over the wind whipping around the open windows of her pickup.

  She worked the stick shift as if it were a natural extension of her arm, engaging the four-wheel drive when they hit a particularly rutted stretch of road that rose and fell like a poor man’s roller coaster. The road was barely wide enough for one vehicle.

  “Something worth killing Sullivan, Harlan, and me for?” Mason asked.

  Humid morning air, heated by the rising sun, filled the cab and softened the stiffness in his back and neck. The rough ride loosened the tougher kinks that remained from sleeping on the cabin floor. Kelly was pushing the pickup at a fast clip that would have been suicidal for someone unfamiliar with the road. Blues and Sandra followed at a distance in his Trans-Am.

  “Not Sullivan. Camaya doesn’t poison people. He shoots them or breaks their neck or runs them off the road. Sullivan may have been on Camaya’s hit list, but somebody beat him to it.”

  “Even if you’re right about that, those DVDs are still pretty pricey.”

  “Camaya is the only one who thinks about how much it’s worth. That’s how he makes payroll. Price didn’t matter to whoever hired Camaya. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it. Whatever is on the DVDs could explain why. You and Harlan may have just gotten in the way, known too much.”

  “But I don’t know anything.”

  “Yeah, but the bad guys think you’re a lot smarter. The rest of us know better. You’ve got the DVDs and that’s enough to make you a target.”

  Mason braced his hands against the dash as the pickup splashed through a washed-out patch of road and leaped over a hilltop. Kelly let out a whoop as she put the truck into a hard right onto smooth blacktop, where it fishtailed before leveling out. She slowed until she caught sight of Blues turning onto the road.

  “Your cabin isn’t exactly on the AAA scenic route.”

  “That’s the idea. I’m the only one who knows where it is. That makes it private for me and safe for you.”

  “If there are two killers, maybe Sullivan’s murder set off a chain reaction that’s out of control. Sandra calls it chaos theory—the rule of unintended consequences.”

  “We can’t rule out anything yet. We haven’t accounted for Sullivan’s movements during the time he was most likely poisoned.”

  “Angela Molina has Scott Daniels on tape talking to someone about Sullivan’s death and St. John’s subpoena the same day Sullivan’s body was found,” Mason said. “Scott left the lake before you woke me on the beach. How did he know that Sullivan was dead?”

  “You said that Angela didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of Scott’s call. That rules out anyone in the firm. So who was Scott talking to?”

  “I don’t know. All I do know is that Scott has been more worried about O’Malley than anything else. When O’Malley fired the firm, Scott lost more than a client—he lost Vic Jr. and Quintex. I’d sure like to find out where that half million dollars in bogus fees ended up.”

  “That may be another link to Harlan’s death,” Kelly said. “If he was getting laundered money, I doubt that he would have reported it on his Form 1040. He may have been willing to give up the whole scheme to stay out of jail. Somebody figured Harlan would deal and killed him to shut him up.”

  “That makes Angela a link between both murders. She knew about the fees. She bugged the phones. She witnessed the change to Sullivan’s will.”

  Mason wondered whom Angela was covering for on the phony bills. He had assumed it was Sullivan because O’Malley was his client. He thought back to his conversation with her and realized that his questions assumed that it was Sullivan. Angela had never said that. Mason had. He remembered the advice he always gave his clients before the other lawyer questioned them: “If he hasn’t got the facts straight, that’s his problem. We’re not here to help the other side.”

&
nbsp; Scott and Harlan were the lawyers on the fixtures deals—not Sullivan. Angela could have been covering for them as easily as for Sullivan. The dirty money that was being washed through Sullivan & Christenson’s books may have financed her “loan” from the firm. Her story about Sullivan blackmailing her could have been just that—a story.

  Angela had always been one to play every angle. She said the tapes were in a safe place. Mason hoped she had one picked out for her.

  Kelly interrupted his thoughts. “The paper trail on the fixtures deals leads to a Chicago law firm that fronts for the mob. Jimmie Camaya works for the mob. Scott and Harlan wouldn’t know how to make those kinds of connections.”

  “So they were drawn into the fixtures scam with Vic Jr. He was the O’Malley involved in the fixtures deals, not his father. Camaya used him as bait to grab Sandra, and now he’s missing.”

  “Who knew you had the DVDs?”

  “Plenty of people. Pamela Sullivan, Sandra Connelly, Diane Farrell, Angela Molina, Maggie Boylan, and Phil Rosa. They’d all seen me with the disks. I’m sure everyone else in the office had heard about them.”

  Mason finally understood the reason his house had been trashed—to find the disks. That’s why they left his computer intact. It was a calling card—a message that they knew he had the disks and they wanted them. And they didn’t know whether he had found what was hidden on them. When in doubt, kill first and ask questions later.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  RILEY BROOKS WAS WAITING for them in the computerized nerve center in the basement of the county courthouse. What was once a deteriorating, mildewed graveyard for closed files and ancient furniture was now a gleaming, climate-controlled tribute to high-tech government.

  Riley stood in the center of it all, beaming at the gadgetry spread around him. Kelly introduced Sandra and Blues. Each of them was greeted with an enthusiastic handshake and clap on the shoulder.