Final judgment

THIRTEEN

He drifted through the rest of the morning, walking two blocks down Broadway to a diner for a greasy cheeseburger at noon. The cold didn’t bother him. It had settled in his bones since Vanessa Carter’s visit.

The phone rang at three o’clock that afternoon. It was Pete Samuelson.

“What can I do for you?” Mason asked him.

“Why don’t you and Mr. Fish come back downtown and we’ll talk. That is, if he doesn’t have any more dead bodies in the trunk of his car.”

“Does that mean you’ve decided to take our offer?”

“I can’t do that while the murder investigation is pending.”

“Then we don’t have anything to talk about.”

“Actually, we do. If your client agrees to cooperate with us, we may be able to help him.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“Just bring him downtown. Tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock.”

Samuelson’s offer meant that he might know enough about the corpse in Fish’s trunk to exonerate Fish but that he hadn’t shared that information with the cops. If he had, the cops would have already given Fish a pass. That meant that the feds were holding out on the cops. It also meant that the feds were conducting their own investigation of a crime that was not in their jurisdiction.

Detectives Griswold and Cates weren’t the kind of cops who would give Mason a heads-up if they no longer considered Fish a suspect. Nor would they tell Mason if Mason called and asked them. They would enjoy letting Fish twist while the investigation ran its course.

Mason picked up his phone, dialing Samantha Greer’s cell phone number from memory. She was a homicide detective with whom Mason had had an on-again, off-again relationship for a couple of years before Mason met Abby. Since Abby left town, Samantha had done her best to fill the void in Mason’s social calendar. Lately she had lost some of the fire that had first attracted him. Working homicide could do that, gradually sucking the life out of you until you ended up alone and drunk. That hadn’t happened to Harry Ryman, a veteran homicide cop who was Mason’s surrogate father, because he had Claire. Samantha didn’t have anyone.

He still enjoyed her company but couldn’t give her the commitment she wanted, feeling guilty that he was stringing her along. The reason was the answer to the question in Tina Turner’s song. Love had everything to do with it. Somehow, they’d defied the odds against ex-lovers remaining friends, though Mason wondered whether that reflected Samantha’s wistful optimism that they would eventually end up together if she just hung in there.

“Detective Greer,” she said, answering on the first ring.

“Feeling official?”

“Feeling beat. Long night on a domestic abuse case that finally hit the finish line. The husband divorced his wife with a baseball bat.”

“Buy you a beer?”

“Business or pleasure?”

“Business first. My client, Avery Fish, a corpse, and your buddies Griswold and Cates.”

“That’ll take two beers. Davey’s Uptown Rambler Club. Meet you there at six.”