Final judgment

TWELVE

Mason rowed eight thousand meters Thursday morning while it was still dark. He kept his rowing machine in the dining room, taking advantage of the double windows to watch the hardy souls who jogged down his block. Yellow light from streetlamps caught the reflecting tape stuck to their running clothes as they passed, leaving puffs of frozen breath visible in their wake.

His exercise routine alternated between running and rowing, not only because of the cross-training benefits, but to avoid boredom. He had played rugby until a few years ago when it became too hard to get out of bed the morning after a vicious scrum. Conceding that he was forty-three, he gave up the game, staying in shape with his current routine.

His house was in a tony neighborhood nine blocks south of the Country Club Plaza, Kansas City’s answer to New York’s Fifth Avenue, and two blocks south of Loose Park, a micro-scale alternative to Central Park. Kansas City didn’t claim to be the Big Apple of the Midwest, but it had long ago shed its cow-town image.

He lived in an area that was home to the upwardly mobile who were certain they’d arrived. Many of the people who lived there were fighting the same battle against time that he was, convinced that if they ran another mile they would live another day. Mason figured eight thousand meters was at least as good an investment.

His Aunt Claire had given the house to him and his ex-wife, Kate, as a wedding present. He’d grown up there with Claire, but the house had worked better for him and his aunt than it did for him and his wife. When Kate moved out, Mason refurnished the dining room with the rowing machine. Abby banished it to the basement, Mason hauling it back up when she left town, his love life defined by its location.

His dog Tuffy, a German shepherd-collie mixed-breed anti-watchdog, did three laps around the rowing machine before settling in front of the flywheel, enjoying the breeze from Mason’s labors.

The sky was rounding out to a gunmetal gray by the time he got out of the shower, dressed, and started scavenging for something that would pass for breakfast in his kitchen. He spread the Kansas City Star on the kitchen table while he chewed a nutrition bar that promised him more than it could possibly deliver.

There was a teaser above the masthead about an article in the Style section on how to make tomorrow, Valentine’s Day, special. Mason had bought a card for Abby, signed it, stuck it in an envelope, and then thrown it away. He didn’t want to be like the nutrition bar and promise Abby something he couldn’t deliver.

An hour later he was in his office, behind his desk, staring at the dry erase board. He used circles, broken and solid lines, boxes, triangles and any other geometry he could think of to link the people and facts of a case, making room for what he knew or suspected and taking stock of what he didn’t know or feared. He studied the resulting graffiti, searching for a pattern that illuminated the answers to the five questions-who, what, where, when, and why. Before retreating to his desk chair, he circled Charles Rockley’s name and drew a solid line to nowhere, punctuating it with a question: Who told Rockley about the tape?

Blues was right. If Rockley had only been employed at Galaxy for a year, he couldn’t have known about the taped conversation between Ed Fiori and Judge Carter unless someone else at Galaxy had told him. Double-checking his reasoning, he pulled up Rockley’s personnel records from the arbitration file and reviewed Rockley’s employment history, comparing it to his testimony at the hearing.

Rockley was thirty-eight years old. He graduated from Ohio University with a business degree and worked a series of middle-level management jobs in unrelated industries before being hired by Galaxy a year ago. He was divorced and had moved around a lot, no job lasting more than a few years. Galaxy hired him to be a shift supervisor for blackjack dealers, a position that required more middle-level management skills than it did an understanding of when to hit on thirteen.

Rockley’s resume was that of a flat-liner, someone who had topped out early, substituting lateral moves for advancement. He was an invisible employee, never leaving a mark or a memory. Asked at the hearing why he’d moved from job to job, he answered that each new job was a better opportunity. It didn’t look that way to Mason, but it was an innocuous answer that Vince Bongiovanni, Carol Hill’s lawyer, didn’t challenge.

In her defense of Galaxy, Lari Prillman underscored something that was missing from Rockley’s employment history. He’d never been the subject of a complaint for sexual harassment. He was, at least on paper, a model-though decidedly undistinguished-employee.

Rockley’s deposition testimony read like the milquetoast image Mason gleaned from his personnel file. He gave polite, simple, and direct answers to the lawyers’ questions, refusing to take Bongiovanni’s bait and fight with the opposing lawyer. Mason could practically see him looking Lari Prillman squarely in the eye as he denied Carol Hill’s allegations with a carefully calibrated hint of outrage at her accusations.

All of which made Mason’s question- Who told Rockley about the tape? — all the more compelling. Rockley was the kind of guy who would never be in the loop on something so sensitive. There was nothing apparent in his past or present to explain why anyone at Galaxy would share with him the explosive information about Judge Carter or Mason.

Perhaps, Mason speculated, he’d stumbled onto it, realized its value, and decided to blackmail the judge to save his job. If so, Mason had grossly underestimated Rockley’s paper persona. Maybe Rockley was one of those guys who showed up at work one morning with an assault rifle and mowed down half a dozen coworkers before the cops shot him, leaving the survivors to scratch their heads and comment what a quiet guy he had always been.

Re-examining the dry erase board, Mason highlighted the names of Al Webb, the casino’s general manager, and Lila Collins, the HR director. Mason assumed that Webb was more likely than Collins to know about the taped conversations, but he relocated their names to the end of the line reaching from Rockley’s.

That was all Mason could do until he heard from Blues. He had no doubt that Rockley would talk to him. When Blues wanted information from someone, he rarely came up empty. The greater risk was what Rockley would do after Blues finished with him. Blues would motivate him to keep his mouth shut and make another career move, this one out of town. Mason was certain Rockley wouldn’t be missed at Galaxy.

If Rockley could point the way further up the food chain at Galaxy, Blues would make him draw a map. Mason would add that information to the dry erase board, knowing it was only a beginning. Rockley had to be the loose end of the thread, not the beginning.

He wasted ten minutes throwing darts at the target hanging on the wall across from his desk, arcing high lob shots, not paying attention to where the darts landed, just passing time. He had other cases to work on, but couldn’t muster his concentration. If the blackmail scheme blew up in his face, he’d be charged with corrupting a public official. He checked the Missouri Criminal Code. It was a Class C felony punishable by a sentence of up to five years in the state penitentiary. The statute of limitations hadn’t run.

He’d also lose his law license and, for the moment, that prospect chilled him as much as prison. Claire had motivated him to become a lawyer, though in the early years of his practice she had often chided him that he didn’t have the fire to become the kind of lawyer she had become. Someone who battled for the underdog, someone who was passionate not only about the law but about justice, sometimes squeezing justice out of a legal system too often reluctant to dispense it.

Claire had eased up on him since he had opened his own practice, spending most of his time defending people accused of crimes. Regardless of their station in life, they were always underdogs when compared to any state or federal prosecutor. Though now she teased him that he was finally showing some promise, he’d learned one fundamental truth about himself: Being a lawyer was who and what he was. Take that away from him and Mason wasn’t certain what would be left.