Lou Mason Mystery - 02 - The Last Witness

by Joel Goldman

  Mason was beginning to think that Toland was like the guy who showed up at every major sporting event wearing a rainbow wig and holding a sign that said John 3:16. Toland had been first on the murder scene; he’d been at the bar to arrest Blues; and he’d busted Mason in Pendergast’s office just in time to prevent Mason from reading Cullan’s files. Nobody had timing that good. Not without help.

  Mason called Rachel Firestone, tapping a pencil on his knee while the phone rang five times.

  “What?” Rachel said, her voice thick with sleep.

  “It’s me, Lou.”

  “Whoopee.”

  “I need you to do something for me. It’s important.”

  “I hope it’s important enough to die for because I’m going to kill you if it isn’t.”

  “I want you to check for any reports of a body found in Swope Park on Thursday evening any time in the three hours before the fire at the barbershop.”

  “Of course. Then I’ll run a check for Jimmy Hoffa when I’m done.”

  “This is serious, Rachel.”

  “This is the middle of the night. Call me tomorrow,” she said, and hung up.

  Mason was jazzed. He had a hunch that felt so right it had to be wrong, and if he was right, it could still go down very wrong. He smacked his hands together.

  “Okay, Mickey. What have you got?”

  “This,” Mickey said, holding up a thumb drive.

  “And that is?”

  “It’s a thumb drive with a copy of the bank records of Ed Fiora and the mayor, plus a few dozen money-laundering stops in between that show a steady stream of cash from Fiora to the mayor. The total is around a hundred and fifty thousand bucks. It began a month before Fiora got his casino license and goes right up to last week. I backed the records up just before Fiora and his trolls did a tap dance on my face. I stuffed it down my pants when they busted in here.”

  Mason jumped out of his chair, pulled Mickey up, and embraced him. “I love you, man!”

  “Don’t go there, dude!” Mickey pushed Mason away and dusted himself off. “Now what?”

  “First of all, you’re hired. Second of all, we work weekends. Tomorrow night, we’re going to the Dream Casino.”

  “We gamble on the job?”

  “Only for high stakes,” Mason said.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Mason was so wired when he got home that he had rowed a two-thousand-meter sprint just to wind down, adding a second sprint for good measure. By the time he took a shower, he was barely able to crawl into bed. The last thing he saw was his clock telling him it was four in the morning.

  He was sleeping the sleep of the comatose when his phone rang Saturday morning. He let it ring until the answering machine came on.

  “Pick up, Lou. The sun is up and you’d better be,” Rachel said.

  Mason fumbled for the phone, trying to clear his throat while squinting at the clock. It was eight o’clock. “I’m here,” he groaned.

  “Good. Paybacks are hell. Why do you want to know about a body in Swope Park?”

  “Can’t tell you,” he said, pulling himself up in bed before collapsing back against his pillows.

  “Why not?”

  “I may be wrong about something. If I am, no one needs to know. If I’m right, you’ll get the story.”

  “It had better be a good story. I talked to one of the dispatchers who’s a friend of mine.”

  “You mean an anonymous source who gets a turkey at Thanksgiving?”

  “I don’t bribe people. The paper is too cheap. She’s a kindred spirit.”

  “A member of the lesbian underground?”

  “We’re everywhere. She said there were no reports of a body being reported or found in Swope Park on Thursday night or any night for the last six months. What does that tell you?”

  “That you may get a hell of a story if I don’t get killed.”

  “Then, don’t get killed. I need all the good stories I can get.”

  “That’s it? No Thanksgiving turkey?”

  “I’d miss you. How’s that?”

  “Nice,” he told her, and hung up.

  Mason rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. He tossed and turned with the uneasy confirmation of his suspicions. He gave up when Tuffy stuck her nose in his face, reminding him that she wasn’t operating on his schedule. Her whimper said she was overdue for breakfast and her morning ablutions in the backyard.

  While Tuffy was outside, Mason took another shower, hoping that the pulsating hot water would trick his body into feeling fresh and renewed instead of tired and abused. After pulling on faded jeans, a washed-out green sweatshirt, and sneakers, he let the dog inside and poured himself into a chair at his kitchen table, wishing someone would appear and make his breakfast.

  Cooking was not one of Mason’s skills. He wasn’t the kind of man who could scour his pantry for a few disparate leftovers and whip up a tantalizing omelet while whistling classical music and puzzling over what wine works best with a bagel and cream cheese. He relied too heavily on fast food, once prompting Claire to warn him that one day he would drive through McDonald’s and the cashier would greet him by asking, “The usual, Mr. Mason?”

  Tuffy was pacing around the kitchen, poking her head into nooks and crannies she’d explored countless times, before stopping in front of Mason and pawing his thigh. He gazed down at her, raising an eyebrow as if to ask, what now? She yelped once and trotted to the back door, repeating the ritual she observed whenever she wanted to go on a walk.

  “Why not?” Mason muttered. “Maybe we’ll find some roadkill for breakfast.”

  He put on his coat, grabbed a ball cap that he yanked low on his brow, and hooked Tuffy’s collar to the leash he kept on a hook by the door.

  Mason hadn’t paid attention to the day until Tuffy took him outside. The sun had blasted away the grim bedrock of slate-colored clouds that had covered the city like a fossil layer for weeks. The temperature had climbed into the forties but felt even warmer in comparison to recent days. The air was crisp and clear and hit him like a shot of adrenaline. The next thing he knew, he was jogging alongside Tuffy, his jacket unzipped and a thin sheen of sweat lining his forehead. He grinned at his dog, who grinned back before sprinting after a squirrel.

  Tuffy led Mason to Loose Park, the city’s second-largest park, which was only a couple of blocks from his house. They stopped at the large pond along Wornall Road long enough for Tuffy to say hello to the other dogs that were walking their owners, Tuffy sniffing enough dog butts to last a lifetime. Mason was about to introduce himself to a good-looking woman with a white fur ball of a dog when Tuffy sniffed the dog once and knocked it on its butt. Horrified, the woman scooped up her dog, gave Mason the finger, and marched off in a huff.

  A few minutes later, Mason and Tuffy power walked past Beth Harrell’s building. He craned his neck skyward, shielding his eyes from the sun, wondering which windows were hers and what she was doing behind her drawn shades. Tuffy wasn’t interested in the answer and tugged him along the last few blocks to the Plaza.

  Mason tied her leash to a traffic sign outside Starbucks while he went inside for a blueberry muffin and a bottle of water. He shared both with Tuffy, pouring the water into a plastic bowl he borrowed from the cashier.

  On the way back, they stopped at the waterfall in front of the Intercontinental Hotel. The waterfall plunged two stories from the pool deck to street level. The fountain had been turned off for the winter, but a heavy layer of ice had built up during the storms of the previous weeks. The sun bore down on the irregular slags of ice, reflecting and refracting across their faults, forecasting the coming meltdown.

  From his vantage point, Mason could see west to the entrance to the hotel’s parking garage on Ward Parkway. He could also see south, up Wornall Road, to Beth’s building, which towered over the roof of the hotel. The juxtaposition of both views crystallized something that had lurked in the jumble of details that this case had become.

  He
remembered Beth telling him that Cullan had taken her home after the incident at Blues on Broadway the night he was killed. She had said that Cullan had dropped her at the door and that she had stayed inside the rest of the night. Later, she had told Mason that she began using the hotel’s parking garage to avoid the press, taking advantage of the walkway between the hotel and her apartment building so that she wouldn’t be seen coming or going.

  Mason guessed that the security system in her apartment building included video monitoring of the apartment garage. Had Beth gone out again that night, or any night, her departure and return would have been recorded. If she’d used the hotel exit strategy, she could have left undetected.

  That scenario, Mason realized, would have left her on foot. He doubted that she would have called a cab to take her to Cullan’s house and told the driver to wait outside while she murdered Cullan.

  Cullan lived in Sunset Hills, an exclusive area just south and west of the Plaza. The hills were real hills by Kansas City standards, making the round-trip walk from the hotel to Cullan’s house a punishing one of several miles, though Beth could have hiked to Cullan’s house, killed him, and walked back.

  Mason shook his head at the possibility. The night Cullan was murdered had been brutal, with a lacerating wind chill and hard-driven snow. Even a cold-blooded killer wouldn’t have made that hike. Unless the killer was convinced that no one else would think she might have done exactly that.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  By the time Mason and Tuffy returned home, the prospect that Beth Harrell had covered the murder of Jack Cullan under a blanket of snow had robbed him of his enthusiasm for the beautiful morning. It also didn’t jibe with his growing suspicion that James Toland and Carl Zimmerman had been dirt gofers for Cullan and might have killed Cullan to go into business on their own, as Claire had theorized.

  When Mason called Zimmerman to ask for his help preserving Cullan’s files, Zimmerman put him off with a lie about working a case involving a dead body in Swope Park. The lie had only one purpose—to keep Mason away from the files until Zimmerman and Toland could steal them and rig the bomb that would destroy the rest.

  It was possible that Zimmerman and Toland hadn’t known where the files were until Mason unwittingly tipped Zimmerman. Maybe Mason’s phone call tipped Zimmerman, or maybe they had known all along, and Mason’s call forced them to move the files. Maybe Shirley Parker made one last visit to check on the files and they killed her when she tried to stop them. There were too many maybes, but none of them made Toland and Zimmerman look clean to Mason.

  Nor did Mason’s suspicions prove anything. It would be difficult and dangerous to make a case against two cops, particularly when one of the cops was Harry’s partner. He had gathered from Harry that it was a good partnership, though neither man had embraced the other as a blood brother. Still, they were cops and they were partners, and that was a stronger bond than most marriages.

  Mason didn’t even know where to begin. He couldn’t talk to Harry, who would dismiss his theory as a malicious red herring Mason had fantasized to cast doubt on Blues’s guilt. Even worse, Harry would consider it an unholy attempt to drive a wedge between him and Zimmerman and an unethical pitch to discredit their investigation. Mason couldn’t go after Zimmerman without painting Harry with the same brush.

  Mason’s best and only idea was to keep an eye on Zimmerman. He had been to Zimmerman’s house once before. Zimmerman lived in Red Bridge, a suburban subdivision in south Kansas City. Mason wouldn’t stake out Zimmerman’s house. That’s what cops and PIs did, not lawyers. Besides, Mason didn’t want to pee into a bottle on a cold day, even if the sun was shining.

  All the same, a drive-by couldn’t hurt. Mason looked at Tuffy. “Want to go for a ride?”

  Tuffy ran him over racing to the garage. Mason opened the door to his TR6, and Tuffy vaulted the stick shift, landing in the passenger seat. It wasn’t a top-down day, but it was close enough.

  For Mason, the TR6 was the last great sports car ever built. He didn’t believe it in the squishy way that some people believe that black is a slimming color, or that all good things come to those who wait. He believed it with the same bedrock certainty that Rocky Balboa believed when he told Mrs. Balboa that a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

  In Mason’s world, BMW, Porsche, and Audi roadsters were for cash-heavy baby boomers willing to overpay for the thrill of the wheel. The Corvette was a contender, but with its powerful engine and oversized tires, it was in another weight class. He conceded that those cars could outperform the TR6, but they couldn’t outcool it. The brand name, Triumph, said it all for Mason.

  The TR6’s raw lines and hard look had captivated Mason the first time he had seen the car. By then, British Leyland had inexplicably abandoned the model, turning each of the ninety-four thousand TR6s it had made from 1969 to 1976 into instant classics.

  Mason had never been much of a car guy. He’d always driven whatever he could afford until he couldn’t afford to keep it running. He’d never gotten sweaty at the sight of a muscle car, nor had his head been turned by a sleek import. The TR6 was different. It had snagged his automotive heart, lingering there unrequited until he’d succumbed years later, taking advantage of a neighbor’s divorce to buy his dream car. It was a British-racing-green, four-speed, six-cylinder, real live ragtop trip.

  Tuffy loved the car more than Mason, delighting in the endless scents that sped past her when the top was down and her nose was in the wind. Sitting in his garage, Mason resisted his dog’s pleading, doleful eyes to put the top down. A man and his dog both blowing in the wind on a cold winter morning would garner too much attention, no matter how brightly the sun was shining.

  As he drove toward Carl Zimmerman’s neighborhood, he had a throat-tightening epiphany. He was in over his head in a death-penalty case that was as likely to cost him his life as it was his client’s. He needed help, and the one person who could help him the most was sitting in the county lockup. Mason tapped the clutch, downshifted, and opened the throttle. The burst of growling speed came at the same moment as a crazy idea of how he could get Blues out of jail.

  Mason circled Zimmerman’s block once, relieved that there were no signs of life in the split-level, brick-front house. He circled again, this time stopping at the curb on the street that intersected Zimmerman’s. A minivan parked in front of him gave him added cover and a right-angle view of Zimmerman’s house, which was in the middle of the block. He turned off his engine and hoped that no one would notice the only classic sports car within miles, even though a sign at the corner read Neighborhood Watch! We Call the Police!

  Tuffy pawed at her window, and Mason cranked the engine so he could put it down for her. She leaned the upper third of her body out the window and wagged her tail in Mason’s face. He knew a bad idea when he had one and said as much to the dog.

  “This is nuts. We’re out of here.”

  Before Mason could put the car in gear, a lumbering black Chevy Suburban turned onto his street. Mason blanched when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw Carl Zimmerman behind the wheel. He scrunched down in his seat, racking his memory for any mention that he might have ever made to Zimmerman about owning the TR6.

  The Suburban rolled past, slowing for the stop sign at the corner. Mason peeked at the Suburban and saw a collection of young faces pressed against the passenger-side windows, mouths agape at the TR6 and the dog riding shotgun, hanging out the window, relieved that Zimmerman ignored him.

  He watched as Zimmerman pulled into his driveway and a half dozen young boys dressed in Cub Scout uniforms piled out of the Suburban, some of them staring and pointing at his car parked half a block away. Carl Zimmerman herded them toward the front door, taking a long look at Mason’s car before following his troop into the house.

  “Brilliant,” Mason told Tuffy. “Carl Zimmerman—homicide detective, Cub Scout leader, and murderer. That’s the ticket!”

  Tuffy ignored him and pointed her sn
out into the breeze as Mason headed for home.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Mason picked Mickey up at nine o’clock, still driving the TR6, counting on the cool to carry into the casino and make them winners. Mickey had told Mason that he was working crowd control at the bar and that Mason should pick him up there instead of at his apartment. Mason was pretty certain that Mickey’s apartment was also his office above the bar but saw no reason to tell Mickey. At least, Mason figured, he’d always know where to find him.

  Mickey was waiting on the sidewalk when Mason pulled up. “Is there a crowd inside that needs to be controlled?”

  “Not unless you count three guys who don’t have four teeth among them. If Blues doesn’t get out soon, I doubt that any PR campaign will save this joint. It’s going to shrivel up and blow away before spring.”

  “Did you do what I told you?” Mason asked as he pulled into the light traffic on Main Street.

  “Piece of cake. I printed out a hard copy of Fiora’s bank records, and I put it in your desk just like you told me.”

  “And what about the rest?”

  “That’s the part I don’t understand. I e-mailed the file to Rachel Firestone just like you told me, but I delayed the actual transmission until ten o’clock Monday morning. What’s up with that?”

  “It’s an insurance policy. We’re going to trade the flash drive to Fiora. He’ll suspect that we kept another copy of the records, and he’ll send someone back to search my office. Hopefully, when he finds the copy you put in my desk, he’ll be satisfied. If he doesn’t hold up his end of the deal I’m going to make with him, Rachel will get the e-mail with the records. If Fiora comes through, we’ll cancel the e-mail.”