The Last Witness

Chapter Five

Mason didn't wait for the elevator doors to close before he headed back to the courtroom. He found Patrick Ortiz giving last-minute instructions to the more junior assistant prosecutors who would handle the remaining cases when court resumed. They stopped talking when Mason approached, the younger lawyers looking away to hide their smirks.

"Patrick, you were way out of line with that shit about Blues being forced to resign from the police department. You know that there's no way in hell that comes into evidence. Except now it will be the lead on every newscast and plastered on the front page. You must want me to file a motion to move the trial out of town so my client can get a fair trial."

"I'm not going to tell you how to try your case, Lou. Bluestone's record as a cop is relevant. It proves he's already shot one person to death. It may not be admissible to prove he killed Jack Cullan, but it's sure as hell relevant to the sentence he's going to get and whether he should get bail."

"Forget about the bail. You're lucky that Blues is more patient than I am. He'll take the county up on its offer of hospitality until the trial."

Ortiz's assistants lost their smirks, but Ortiz maintained his poker face. "I understand that the food is quite good, though a bit repetitive," he said. "As long as your client is prepared to sit for a while, maybe he'd like to talk about a plea."

"Is that how you pumped up your conviction record, Patrick? Squeeze the hard cases until they plead and take the chumps to trial? The only plea my client is going to make is innocent. Be sure to tell that to whoever is yanking your chain on this one."

Mason knocked on the open door to Mickey Shanahan's office as soon as he returned from court. Mickey's office was smaller than Mason's and didn't have any windows. It did have a lot of posters. Mostly from political campaigns. Mickey didn't have a desk. Instead, he had a card table and four chairs. Mason figured that if business was slow, Mickey could always invite people over to play bridge. When Mason knocked, Mickey was straddling one of the card table chairs, his back to the door, while wadding up pages from the morning paper and tossing them at a basketball goal, making the swish sound regardless of whether he made the shot.

Mason had talked to Mickey a few times during the six months Mickey had been a tenant. Mason liked his scrappy attitude, but couldn't figure out how he made a living. Blues told Mason that Mickey had graduated from college a couple of years earlier, worked for a big PR firm in town, and then decided to go it alone. That's when he signed a lease with Blues. Mason had yet to see a client walk into or out of Mickey's office, and wasn't surprised that Mickey was behind on his rent.

"Hey, Mickey. What's going on, man?" Mason asked from the open door.

Mickey glanced over his shoulder, beamed when he saw Mason, and scrambled to his feet.

"You're asking me?" Mickey picked up the front page of the newspaper with the two-inch headline announcing EX-COP ARRESTED FOR MURDER OF POLITICAL BOSS. "I should be asking you what's going on. No, I shouldn't. I should be telling you to hire me to handle the PR on this case. I'm telling you, Lou. This case, win or lose-and don't get me wrong, I'm pulling for you and Blues-this case can make you in this town. Blues too if you win. It's all about spin, my friend."

Mickey had an unruly shock of brown hair that fell across his pale Irish forehead. He could pour nutrition shakes down his throat with a funnel and still be nearly invisible when he turned sideways. He was a five-foot-seven, finger-tapping, pencil-twirling, punch-line machine, all revved up with no place to go.

"I'll keep that in mind," Mason promised. "In the meantime, Blues wants you to run the club for a while. The judge wouldn't let him out on bail. Blues says you can work off the back rent you owe him."

"Outstanding!" Mickey said. He crossed the short distance to the door and shook Mason's hand. "Outstanding!"

"I'll tell Blues you said so," Mason told him. "Do you know what to do?"

"Haven't a fucking clue, man," Mickey said. "But no one will know the difference. That's public relations!"

Mason took Mickey's word for it and retreated to his own office. Mason's aunt Claire claimed that Mason's office proved her theory of men and their response to available space.

"No matter how much stuff a man has," she told him, "it will fill every available inch of open space. Put him in a smaller office with just as much stuff, and the stuff shrinks to fit. Add a hundred square feet and a man's stuff will spread over it like a rising tide."

Located at the end of the hall, Mason's office spread out on both sides of the door. Bookshelves lined the back wall on either side of the door. Client files were crammed into the shelves on one side and books filled the other. On the right side of the office, more files, a rugby football, and a pair of sweats competed for room on an overstuffed corduroy-covered sofa on which he'd spent more than a few nights. A large brightly colored Miro print hung over the sofa.

A low table and two chairs in front of the sofa created a seating area. Mason dropped his camel-hair topcoat on one chair and his suit coat on the other.

The opposite wall was covered with a four-foot-by-six-foot dry-erase board enclosed by burnished oak doors. The inside panels of the doors were covered in cork. A rolled screen was mounted above the dry-erase surface. Mason was a visual thinker. He kept track of ideas, questions, and answers by writing them in different colors on the dry-erase board. He pinned similar notes written while out of the office onto the cork surface. When a problem was solved, he erased it. He preferred working out difficult cases by studying the notes on his board until order emerged from the chaos.

The exterior wall of the office widened out in a three-sided windowed alcove, the center section of which was occupied by his desk. The desk was flanked on one side by a computer workstation housing a combination printer, fax, scanner, and copier, and a small refrigerator on the other that was usually empty except for a six-pack of Bud. Mason didn't have enough room or business to support a secretary. He gave thanks every day to his eighth-grade typing teacher who had threatened to hold him back if he didn't learn to touch-type.

A faded Persian rug covered the center of the hardwood floor. Mason knew that his aunt Claire was right about men and their stuff. His office was cluttered, but it was a comfortable clutter.

Mason opened the doors to the dry-erase board, picked up a red marker, and began writing. Next to Jack Cullan's name he wrote victim/fixer and the questions Who's afraid of Jack? and Who wins if Jack dies?

Switching to black, he wrote Blues-at the scene?-connection to Cullan?

Still using the black marker, he wrote on the next line Harry-why so certain about Blues? Who's pushing Harry?

Mason picked up the blue marker and wrote Beth Harrell-why with Cullan? His last entry was in red. Who else?

Mason was sitting in his desk chair, reading the police reports and deciding what to add to the board, when there was a sharp knock at the door, followed immediately by Rachel Firestone's entrance. She looked first at Mason and then the board before she even said hello. Mason was too far from the board to close the doors and prevent her from reading everything he'd written, so he pretended not to care rather than give her the satisfaction of thinking she'd seen something she shouldn't have.

"I don't suppose there's any point in asking you if you had an appointment," Mason said.

"I don't suppose there was any reason to ask for one since you'd just tell me no," Rachel answered.

"Can't argue with that. How about I just tell you no and you leave?"

"Give it up, Lou. I'm on this story and you're on this case. We can't avoid each other. It won't be that bad. You'll get used to me. You'll probably even get a crush on me, make a stupid pass, and I'll break your heart and make your testicles shrivel like raisins in one fell swoop."

Mason took a good look at her as she posed for him, hands on her hips, her chin punched out at him in a devilish, take-your-best-shot angle. She was luminescent, inviting, and somehow unattainable. Mason felt a surge that had been dormant since he'd broken up with Kelly Holt, the woman who had investigated the murders of his former partners. It was the jolting combination of need, desire, and unexpected opportunity. He'd dated a few women since Kelly, but in each case they'd been using each other to satisfy their needs of the moment, and he hadn't made more than a glandular connection.

"And why would you do that? The testicles part, I mean."

"Can't be helped, Lou. I'm gay. I'm a boots, jeans, flannel-shirt-wearing, short-haired lipstick lesbian. Though I'm a knockout in a simple black dress I keep in my closet for special occasions."

"That would do it," he conceded as his rising sap retreated to its roots. "Thanks for sparing me."

"Not a problem. I like getting that out of the way up front. Fewer complications," she added as she picked up the football and made a place for herself on the sofa. She tossed the ball back and forth between her hands, frowning at its odd feel.

"It's for rugby," Mason explained.

"That's a hard-hitting game. You play?" she asked.

"Not as much as I used to. I'm getting a little old by rugby standards to dive into a bunch of maniacs going after the ball. I'll take you to a game in the spring," he offered without understanding why.

"Great. I'd like that," she said with a smile that filled him with regret. "So Beth Harrell was with Jack Cullan the night he was killed," Rachel said, pointing to Mason's board.

"You heard that too?" Mason asked her.

"Yup. I tried to talk with her, but she keeps her door locked. Any idea why they were out together?"

Mason hesitated. He felt as if he were walking on an active fault line with Rachel that could cleave open and swallow him at any moment. She was beautiful, flirtatious, and completely unavailable. She knew she had him off balance, and was enjoying his disadvantage. He could live with that so long as she didn't take advantage of him in a way that compromised his defense of Blues.

"I think we need some ground rules here," he told her.

"So do I. Here's freedom-of-the-press rule number one. Everything's on the record unless you tell me in advance that it isn't on the record."

Mason shook his head. "Here's defense-lawyer rule number one. Nothing is on the record unless I say so. Rule number two-burn me and I'll cut you off at the knees."

Rachel folded her arms over her chest. "You're just angry about the lesbian thing. Hey, it wasn't my idea. A girl doesn't get to choose. Not that I'm complaining." Mason's only response was to reach for the doors to the board and start to close them. "Okay, okay," she told him. "Nothing is on the record unless you say so."

"Good. I don't know why they were at the bar, but I think she'll tell me."

"Why?"

"First, because I'm not going to print it on the front page of the newspaper in a story accusing her of being a crook. Second, I can put her under oath and make her tell me, and third, we know each other."

"How?"

"I took ethics from her when she taught at the law school. I was a first-year student and it was her first semester teaching. We hit it off pretty well, but I've only run into her a few times since I graduated. Alumni functions and that kind of thing."

Rachel nodded. "Is your client guilty?"

"No."

"How do you know?" she asked him.

Mason said, "He told me so."

"That's not good enough for an acquittal," Rachel said.

"It's good enough for me. All I have to do is figure out who did kill Jack Cullan. The cops are done looking. Any suggestions?" he asked her.

Rachel walked over to the dry-erase board, picked up the red marker, and wrote Cullan's secret files next to Mason's entry Who else?

"I've been chasing after Jack Cullan's shadow for three years," she said. "He was into everything important that happened or didn't happen in this town. Want to get elected? Go see Jack. Want to cut a deal with the city? Need tax increment financing? How about the pay telephone contract at the airport? Go see Jack. He always delivered the goods."

"How did he do it? Where did he get that kind of influence?"

"Cullan invested in the long term. Long-term relationships. Long-term political IOUs. One day, the city wakes up and peeks out from under its covers. Only the view is from Jack Cullan's back pocket. I kept picking up threads of a rumor that I put together even though I couldn't get anyone to corroborate it. Cullan took a page from J. Edgar Hoover's playbook. He supposedly had secret files on enough people in town to keep everyone in their place. He liked pulling strings and made certain the strings were tied on very tightly."

"You said you couldn't corroborate that. How do you know it's true?"

"The same reason you know your client is innocent. I can feel it. I just can't find the files."

Mason said, "Anyone who was in those files may have had a motive to kill Jack Cullan. The rest of them would give anything to make certain the files stayed secret. The easiest way for that to happen is to make certain Blues is found guilty."

"I'll make you a deal," Rachel said. "You find the files first, I get the exclusive. I find the files first, I'll let you see them before I go public."

Mason gave her a broad smile. "Deal," he told her. "Why so generous?"

"Let's just say that I'm a sucker for a good-looking rugby player," Rachel told him. Mason's smile got wider, his hope restored. "In fact, I'm dating one now. She's fabulous. I'll be in touch," she said as she left.