The Last Witness

Chapter Two

Mason scraped the hard crystal snow off the windshield of his Jeep Cherokee. The cast-iron sky hung low enough that Mason half expected to scrape it off the glass as well. His car was parked behind the bar, reminding him that covered parking was the only perk he missed from his days as a downtown lawyer. The Jeep was strictly bad-weather transportation. His TR-6 was hibernating in his garage, waiting impatiently for a top-down day.

Mason drove north on Broadway, a signature street of rising and falling fortunes Kansas City wore like an asphalt ID bracelet. From the lip of the Missouri River on the north edge of downtown to the Country Club Plaza shopping district, forty-seven blocks south, Broadway was high-rise and low-rise, professionals and payday loans, insurance and uninsurable, homes and homeless. The Big Man and the Little Man elbowing each other for position.

As he drove, Mason wondered how Blues had been linked to Cullan's murder. As far as Mason knew, Blues and Cullan had never even met. Mason wondered whether something had happened between them when Blues was a cop, something that led to Cullan's murder years later. Mason dismissed that as unlikely. Blues didn't carry grudges for years. He settled them or expunged them.

It was possible, Mason thought, that Cullan had surfaced in one of the cases Blues had handled as a private investigator, as either a target or a client. Blues had talked little with Mason about his cases, unless he needed Mason's help.

Before he bought the bar, Blues had taught piano at the Conservatory of Music. Cullan hadn't seemed the type to take up music late in life, and teaching someone the difference between bass clef and treble clef wasn't likely to drive Blues to murder. At his worst, Blues would tell a student to play the radio instead of the piano.

Mason knew that Harry Ryman was right about one thing: Blues had his own system of justice and he didn't hesitate to use violence to enforce it. Violence, Blues had told Mason, was a great equalizer. It leveled the playing field against long odds. Few people would use it, even those who threatened it. The threat without follow-through was weak, a shortcoming Blues couldn't abide. Though Blues wasn't casual about violence. He wielded it with the precision and purpose of a surgeon using a scalpel.

Blues had been Harry's partner when Blues was a cop. Harry was the veteran and Blues was the rookie, a mismatched odd couple. Harry was a by-the-book cop and Blues insisted on writing his own book. Their partnership, and Blues's career as a cop, had ended six years earlier when Blues shot and killed a woman during a drug bust. Internal Affairs gave Blues the choice of quitting or being prosecuted. He quit.

Harry had said little to Mason over the years about his relationship with Blues, except for warning him that Blues would go down one day and that Harry would be there, waiting. Blues had said less, and both men had refused to talk about the case that had fractured their relationship. The one constant was the tension between them. Mason wouldn't call it hatred. That was too simple. Harry and Blues shared a wound neither man could heal because they both had too much pain. Whenever the three of them were together, Mason felt like the bomb squad trying to guess whether Blues or Harry would go off first.

Mason believed that gatekeepers ruled the world. They were the people who answered the phones, manned the desks, or kept the calendars for the people everyone else needed to see. The ideal gatekeeper was trained from birth in passive-aggressive behavior designed to cause acid reflux in anyone who petitioned for access to the gatekeeper's master. How else to explain the uncanny ability to dodge, defer, and deny Mason's always reasonable requests for access or information? Mason tried being humble, witty, flirtatious, or threatening, depending on what he'd had for breakfast. Sometimes the walls came down and sometimes they got higher.

"I'm Lou Mason," he told the desk sergeant. "Harry Ryman brought in Wilson Bluestone a few minutes ago. I'm Bluestone's lawyer."

The desk sergeant was reading USA Today. He wore a name tag that read sgt. Peterson and had a slack expression that read who cares? when he looked at Mason over his half glasses, sighed his resentment at Mason's intrusion, and picked up the phone. "He's here," Peterson said to whoever had picked up on the other end. Peterson traded the phone for his newspaper and resumed ignoring Mason.

A civilian police department employee materialized and escorted Mason to the second-floor detective squad room. She politely pointed him to a hard-backed chair that had been decorated with the carved initials of prior occupants. The squad room reflected the uninspired use of public money-pale walls, faded vanilla tile, and banged-up steel desks covered with the antiseptic details of destroyed lives.

Mason waited while the crosscurrents of cops and their cases flowed around him. He'd been here before, waiting to be questioned and accused. An ambivalent mix of urgency and resignation permeated the place. Cops had a special sweat, born of the need to preserve and protect and the fearful realization that they were too often outnumbered. That sweat was strongest in homicide.

Homicide cops took the darkest confessions of the cruelest impulses. They sweet-talked, cajoled, and deceived the guilty into speaking the unspeakable. The more they heard, the more they were overwhelmed by one simple truth: There were more people willing to kill than they could stop from killing or catch before the bodies were in the ground. Sterile statistics on closed cases couldn't mask the smell of blood and the taste for vengeance that clung to homicide cops like a second skin.

Justice was supposed to cleanse them, but justice was sometimes washed away by the pressure to make an arrest. Even a good cop like Harry Ryman wasn't immune from the pressure or his feelings toward Blues. Mason knew that saving Blues meant slowing down the clock.

Mason also knew that saving Blues meant taking on Harry Ryman. Mason could remember the days when Harry used to pick him up by his belt loops and swing him up over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. And Mason could remember the day he graduated from law school and Harry bear-hugged him with a father's pride. Easing his grip just enough to see Mason's face, Harry had told him how to navigate the uncertain waters that his clients would take him through.

"Just do the right thing," Harry had told him. "You won't have any trouble knowing what it is. The only hard part is doing it." Life was never more complicated than that for Harry.

Harry interrupted Mason's droughts. "You can see him now. He's in number three. No one will be watching or listening," Harry said, pointing Mason to the third interrogation room down the hall from where Mason sat. "Don't worry about it, Lou," Harry added. "Just do your job and I'll do mine."

Blues was standing at the far end of the room staring into a mirror that covered most of the wall when Mason opened the door to Interrogation Room No. 3. Blues's burnished, coppery skin, straight black hair, and fiery eyes were muted under the exposed fluorescent tubes that hung from the ceiling.

"You're not that good-looking," Mason told him.

"I get prettier every day," Blues answered. "It's a two-way mirror," he explained, reminding himself and Mason of his previous life as a cop. "Couple of detectives sit on the other side and watch the interrogation. This room is wired for sound."

"Harry said that no one is watching or listening."

"You believe that, Lou?"

"I believe that they aren't that stupid. If they want you for this murder, they aren't going to fuck it up like that. Harry won't, anyway."

Blues took a slow turn around the room as if to measure himself against his surroundings. As he did, Mason thought about his first criminal defense client, Wally Sutherland, a businessman who had been a client of his last firm, Sullivan & Christenson. Wally's one-thing-led-to-another encounter with a woman he'd met in a bar had ended with his arrest for attempted forcible rape. When Mason had first visited Wally in the city jail, he had cried for his wife, his mother, and God, in that order. Mason had never seen Blues cry, and didn't expect he ever would. Blues had contained the coiled anger that rippled through his body when Harry put the cuffs on him. Mason didn't want to be around when Blues let that spring unwind.

Mason asked, "They didn't try to question you without me, did they?"

"Nothing official. Harry tried to make it like old times. Good old Harry stroking me, telling me how much easier it would be just to get the whole thing over with. His partner, Zimmerman, telling him to hold off until you got here. Harry telling Zimmerman that I was too smart to fall for any tricks, especially since I had been such a smart cop myself. Saying that he was just reminding me of what I already knew."

Mason said, "Harry playing good cop with you is-"

"Stupid," Blues said, interrupting. "Ryman's done everything but put a bounty on my ass, and he thinks he's gonna talk me into confessing because he's such a damn nice guy. Bullshit."

"What do they have on you?" Mason asked.

Blues leaned over the oak table that separated him from Mason, planting both hands firmly on the surface. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and jeans. Mason had a fleeting image of him in jailhouse orange.

"First things first. Can you do this?" Blues asked.

"What do you mean, can I do this? You've seen the law license hanging in my office. I'm an official member of the bar. Murder cases are a walk in the park. Besides, at the rate I'm charging you, I can't afford to take long to get you off. I'll go broke."

Blues didn't laugh or smile. His face was a death mask. "I'm not asking you about the lawyer piece. You're as good as anybody I've ever seen. I want to know, can you do this?"

Mason understood the question. "Harry isn't the issue. He's not looking at the needle. You are."

"Ryman doesn't just think I killed Jack Cullan. He wants it to be me. Cops who want somebody found guilty know how to make that happen."

"Not Harry. He's hard. He probably does want it to be you, but Harry plays it straight. He doesn't know any other way."

"We get to court, Ryman's on the stand-can you take him on, carve him up, make the jury want to blame him instead of me? Can you tell the jury that Harry Ryman doesn't know his ass from third base and hates his old partner enough to send him to death row even if I'm innocent? Can you go home and tell your aunt Claire when all this is over that it was just business?"

Mason had asked himself the same questions as he drove downtown. Hearing Blues ask them reaffirmed the advice Harry had given him years ago. Knowing the right thing to do was easier than doing it. Since Harry was the lead on the investigation into Cullan's murder, his testimony would have enormous impact on the jury. Blues's life might depend on Mason's ability to turn the case into a trial of Harry and his investigation rather than a trial of Blues's innocence.

Mason realized another troubling aspect of Blues's questions. The criminal justice system was sometimes more about criminals than it was about justice. Innocent people were convicted for any number of reasons. Cops who planted evidence. Lazy defense lawyers. Jurors who believed that only guilty people got arrested, especially if they were black or brown. Being innocent wasn't always enough.

That's why nothing scared Mason more than a client that wasn't guilty. The gang-banger, the embezzler, the jealous spouse turned killer, all knew in their gut that they'd do the time. They knew that after their lawyer turned every technical trick he had, the system would beat them. The odds favored the house.

Innocent people didn't understand any of that. They were just innocent. End of story. Mason carried the burden of their freedom.

Innocent people didn't understand that the government had every edge; that the government didn't have to tell the defense lawyer anything about the government's case. Mason had represented another lawyer who had been charged with accepting kickbacks for settling personal injury cases for inflated amounts. The lawyer had been used to the civil justice system where the rules required both sides to lay all their cards on the table so that there were no surprises at trial. He nearly fainted when Mason had explained to him that most criminal cases were trial by ambush, with the government disclosing as little as possible, even withholding a witness's statement until after the witness had testified.

Mason used to wonder why the rules for fighting over other people's money were so carefully crafted to ensure a level playing field while the rules for saving an innocent person's life were so harsh. He decided it was because the people who wrote the rules were used to fighting over money and took their freedom for granted. He believed in the old joke that a liberal was just a Republican who'd been indicted.

Mason sat down in another hard-backed chair, set the legal pad he was carrying on the table, and wrote the name of the case-State v. Milestone-across the top of the first page.

"If I can prove you're innocent, I'll do it any way I have to. Harry doesn't expect anything less. He won't cut either one of us any slack and he'll get none from me. Now tell me what they've got on you."

Blues hesitated a moment, then nodded and sat down across from Mason.

"Jack Cullan came in the bar last Friday night, about nine o'clock."

Mason asked, "You knew him?"

"He tried to hire me once. He wanted me to take pictures of a dude playing hide the nuts with the wrong squirrel. I took a pass."

"How long ago was that?"

"Not long enough that he didn't recognize me when he came in the bar. When he paid for the drinks, he told me that I should have taken the job since it paid better than bartending. I told him it didn't pay better than bar-owning."

"Was he alone?"

"The absolute opposite of alone. He was with a fine-looking woman, early forties, my guess."

"Did you get her name?"

"Not at first. Before she left, she gave me her card. Her name was Beth Harrell."

Mason said, "As in Beth Harrell, the chair of the Missouri Gaming Commission?"

"Not likely that there's more than one Beth Harrell who'd be out clubbing with Jack Cullan."

"I can't believe she was out anywhere with Cullan," Mason answered. "Cullan and Harrell have been all over the front page of the Star. She's got to be out of her mind to be out with that guy."

"Maybe that's why she threw a drink in his face," Blues said.

"Okay," Mason said. "You want to take this from the top or just play catch-the-zinger?"

"You're the one asking the questions. I'm just the defendant."

"Start talking or I'll give you up to the public defender."

"Take it easy, Lou. You've got to work on your jailhouse manner," Blues told him. "I was on the bar. Pete Kirby, Kevin Street, and Ronnie Fivecoat had just started their set. Weather's so bad, the place is dead, but they were killing it, really cooking."

Mason had heard the trio before. Kirby on piano, Street on bass, and Fivecoat on drums. He'd have happily gone anywhere to hear them play.

"So Jack Cullan and Beth Harrell are doing their own jazz-club crawl on one of the worst nights of the year and pick your place to get warm?"

"You ask Beth Harrell why they were there. She didn't confide in me. I served them drinks and didn't pay any more attention to them until she stands up and douses him. Cullan's old and fat, but that old, fat man jumped up and popped her with the back of his hand. Knocked her on the floor."

Mason said, "I assume you didn't just tell them to take it outside so you could listen to Kirby's trio?"

"Would have been the smart play. But I don't like it when fat, old men slap women around. I grabbed Cullan from behind to help him calm down. That little prick scratched me like a cheap whore before I squeezed the air out of him."

Blues held up the backs of his hands so that Mason could see the red claw marks on both of them. "Broke the skin," Blues added.

"Was that it?" Mason asked.

"Almost. I told Beth Harrell that she should press charges against Cullan. She said that wasn't necessary, that they'd just had a misunderstanding. She was very cool about the whole thing. Gave me her business card, like that was some kind of free pass for getting smacked around."

"And then they left?"

"Yeah. Cullan was breathing again and was very pissed. He promised me that my liquor license would be gone in a week."

Mason knew that Blues wouldn't have let the threat go unanswered, and he waited for Blues to finish the story. Blues looked at the two-way mirror. "You sure they aren't listening in on this?"

"Not if they want to see you strapped to that gurney with a needle in your arm. What did you say to Cullan?"

Blues sighed, looked at the mirror again, and then back at Mason. "I told him that if he tried jacking with my license or ever came in my bar again, I'd twist his head off and stuff it up his ass."

"Well, that was memorable and stupid. What happened to being the strong silent type?"

"Cullan is used to getting in the last word, shoving people around, pimp-slapping women. No way he walks out of my place like he owned it."

"Blues's Law," Mason said. "What about afterward? What did you do after you closed the bar?"

"Home, man. By myself."

Mason stopped writing. "So you fought with this guy, he threatened you, and you threatened him back. Plus your blood and skin were under Cullan's fingernails when the maid found him. Harry's probably talked to Bern Harrell and Kirby, Street, and Fivecoat. He's got four witnesses to the threat and forensic evidence to go with it. And you don't have an alibi. I'd say he does like you for the murder."

Mason pushed back from the table and got up. Blues asked, "Where are you going?"

"Talk to Harry and find out what he's really got."

" Aren't you forgetting to ask me one thing?" Blues asked.

"What's that?" Mason answered.

"If I did it?"

Mason shook his head and smiled. "Don't have to. You would have told me. Blues's Law."

Blues smiled for the first time. "I guess you can do this, Lou."

"That I can," Mason said.