Joel Goldman - Final judgment

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.

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.”

Mason ran into Blues in the parking lot behind Blues on Broadway. The potholes that Blues had filled the previous summer had returned, the asphalt giving way to the freezing, wet winter. The left front tire of Mason’s SUV rested in one crater, tilting it like a sinking ship. Only one of the two halogen lamps Blues had installed to light the back of the building was working. Blues was a much better piano player than he was a property manager.

The parking lot was narrow, bordered by an alley that ran between the buildings that fronted Broadway and a string of old, three-story apartments one block to the east that backed up to the other side. The high walls on both sides kept out light and warmth except when the sun was directly overhead, the urban terrain making a cold, dark night colder and darker.

They leaned against Mason’s SUV, Blues nearly invisible in a black leather jacket, Mason cupping his hands, blowing on them for warmth. Mason hadn’t seen or talked with him since their first conversation about Rockley.

“Any luck?” Mason asked him.

“Zero.”

“Try his house?”

Blues’s expression didn’t change, even though Mason knew it was a stupid question the moment he asked it.

“Three times. Lives in an apartment up north. His mailbox is full. Nobody has seen him. But we’re not the only ones looking for him. One of the neighbors told me someone else came around yesterday.”