The Second Life of Nick Mason

9

Detective Sandoval’s hunt for Nick Mason had brought him to one of the most expensive streets in Chicago. Sandoval parked a few doors down from the town house and double-checked the address. Lincoln Park fucking West, he said to himself. With the park right across the street. The gardens, the conservatory, the zoo. A great view of Lake Michigan. This is the place. This is where Nick Mason lives now.

Sandoval remembered Mason’s last address. Or rather his last address before USP Terre Haute. It was a little shitbox in Canaryville, one of those houses they built right on top of one another with barely enough room to walk between them. Forty-third Street, if his memory was right. He’d seen it a few days after that night at the harbor. He’d just recently been partnered with Higgins back then, still getting the hang of the guy. Higgins was at the peak of his career, with a winning streak of big busts that would have made most cops insufferable. But Higgins wore his success well, with just enough self-confidence to believe he could solve any murder in the city. That’s how they ended up on the Sean Wright case. It was a “heater case,” with a mandate from the superintendent’s office. A federal agent had been killed. They needed to solve it and solve it quickly.

They started with the one dead suspect, a man from Canaryville named Finn O’Malley. A perfect name, Sandoval thought, for a mick from that part of town. O’Malley had a long record of minor incidents, some pickups on more serious charges that never went anywhere, until an aggravated assault on a police officer put him away for eighteen months. They went to O’Malley’s last-known residence and asked around. They got nothing. Sandoval was ready to take it personally, all the locals closing ranks on him. But Higgins kept his cool and dragged him back to the station and they spent a full day going through old arrest records. If they couldn’t find any known associates who also went away to prison, they could at least find some other men O’Malley might have been picked up with even if everybody eventually walked.

That’s how they came up with two more names. Eddie Callahan and Nick Mason. They’d been picked up together and then released, on two separate occasions, a few years apart. A long-standing relationship.

Sandoval and Higgins went out looking for both men. They found them in Canaryville-Eddie Callahan at his fiancée’s apartment and Nick Mason at the house he shared with his wife and young daughter. Both men denied any involvement in the harbor job. Both men claimed they had been straight for years. Both men admitted that they had seen Finn O’Malley at Murphy’s bar on the night in question but that he had left the bar long before Callahan and Mason went home.

The two detectives checked out their story at the bar. The bartender on duty that night confirmed that O’Malley had been there, had left early, and that Callahan and Mason had stayed.

“You trust that guy?” Sandoval said to Higgins as they walked back to their car. “Who’s the guy who killed Lincoln? John Wilkes Booth? If he’s a Canaryville guy, this bartender’s fucking great-grandfather swears Booth was at the bar all night. Never went near that theater.”

“Went deep for that one,” Higgins said.

“Am I wrong?”

“You’re not wrong.”

The next day, a stolen car was found in a parking lot a mile down the road. The blood was tested and found to be consistent with Finn O’Malley’s.

“Somebody brought that blood home,” Higgins said.

“Only been a few days,” Sandoval said. “If either guy’s in his own car that night…”

Higgins looked at his partner. They both knew what would happen next. Warrants were served. The cars were impounded. In Mason’s car, they ended up finding trace amounts of Finn O’Malley’s blood on the right armrest of the driver’s seat. Callahan’s car was clean.

When Mason was brought in, Sandoval and Higgins sat there in the interview room for a while. Higgins had already told Sandoval to do the talking. He had a gut feeling that Mason wouldn’t say a word to either one of them, but at least Sandoval was the same age. He might have a slightly better shot at him.

Sandoval kept watching Mason, waiting for the pressure to build. For most guys, it doesn’t take long. You just have to sit there and wait for it to become real to him.

I’m sitting in a room with two cops, the guy will say to himself. There can only be one reason for that. They’ve got me nailed.

But Sandoval wasn’t seeing this on Mason yet. All the signs you look for. The way the eyes start moving around. Looking toward the door. Thinking about what you can say that will get you out of the room. Never mind where I go next, just get me the fuck out of here.

The hands coming together. The man instinctively protecting himself. Closing himself into a ball.

Or the legs starting to shake under the table. All that tension, it has to go somewhere. But no, not this guy. He wasn’t giving them anything.

Not yet.

“Canaryville kid,” Sandoval said, finally breaking the silence. “You go to Saint Gabriel’s?”

Mason said nothing.

“Bet you’re a Sox fan, too. I’m from Avondale, been a Cubs fan my whole life.”

Mason stared past them at a spot on the wall.

“You go to Tilden High School? We played basketball there.”

Mason kept staring at the wall.

“We saw your house there on Forty-third, Nick. Do a lot of work to the place? Me, I do all the painting at my house.” He was still living with his wife and kids at that time and he really did do all of the painting. It wasn’t a lie.

“Here’s the thing,” Sandoval went on. “I try to be clean, but painting’s a fucking mess, you know? You do the painting at your house?”

Mason stayed silent.

“When I’m done,” Sandoval said, “I got paint all over myself. My arms, in my hair. My face. So I go to the sink and I wash up and I think I’m nice and clean. Until my wife finds me and says, ‘Hey, genius, what’s this?’ And she points to my elbows.”

Sandoval stood up and came around to Mason’s side of the table. He leaned close to Mason and showed him his right elbow.

“Right here,” he said. “I can’t see it when I’m washing. You know what I’m saying? So I miss it every time, Nick. Every single goddamned time. You think I’d know by now. Wash your elbows, Frank. And if I’m dumb enough to get in the car, what happens next?”

Sandoval put his arm down as if resting it on an armrest.

“Leather, you got a shot at cleaning that off. But I don’t got leather seats, Nick. Can’t afford it. I got cloth.”

He got close this time. Just a few inches from Mason’s ear. “Just like you.”

They tried to convince Mason to turn on Eddie Callahan. They knew Callahan was involved. Confirming that fact would just be a formality. They also tried to convince Mason to give them the identity of the fourth man. Everything would go a lot easier, they told him, if he would just cooperate. Otherwise, the prosecutor would go for the max. It was a dead DEA agent, so everyone was out for blood. Mason shouldn’t have to take it all alone.

Mason kept his mouth shut.

Even though Sandoval and Higgins made the arrest, the feds ultimately took the case away because it was a DEA agent who’d been killed. Neither man cared. What mattered was that Nick Mason drew twenty-five-to-life and went to Terre Haute.

But now, five years later, sixty fucking months later, Detective Sandoval was sitting here in his car waiting for Nick Mason to show up, a man who was free only because his old partner stood up in court and told the judge that he had taken blood evidence from the scene, brought it with him, carried it around for hours-for hours-then found some way to plant it in Nick Mason’s car.

That’s the way it was written. That was the official fucking record. And his partner’s life was destroyed.

He felt his cell phone buzzing in his pocket. He took it out and read the text. It was Sean Wright’s wife, Elizabeth, widow of a dead federal agent, single mother trying to raise two kids on her own, asking if the two families would still be getting together that weekend.

Sandoval texted back a reply. Yes, looking forward to it. Which was true. It was his one chance to see his own kids that week. His one chance to pretend the job hadn’t cost him everything else in his life.

He took one more look at Nick Mason’s new address. Then he drove away.