Joel Goldman - Final judgment

Lights came on inside the house at seven-thirty. Carol opened her front door and a puppy bolted outside, sniffing the crisp air. She was wearing a robe and slippers and padded down the driveway to pick up her newspaper. Mason waited until she was at the curb before he got out of his car.

“Nice morning,” he said to her.

“I wasn’t expecting company,” she said. Her hair was tangled from sleep and her eyes were puffy from having just woken up.

“I don’t blame you. I’ve got a busy day and wanted to be sure I caught you. It’s about Johnny Keegan.”

She clutched the unopened paper to her chest. “What about him?”

“I talked to Lila Collins. She and Keegan were close, but you knew that.” Carol’s eyes narrowed and she nodded. “Anyway, turns out Keegan asked Lila to recommend a lawyer and she told him about me. That’s why he was carrying around my name and number when he was killed. Small world, huh?”

“Yeah. Real small.”

“Remember the other morning when we met at Vince’s suite at the Galaxy Hotel, I asked you if Keegan told you why he needed a lawyer and you said he didn’t?”

Carol retreated a few steps toward the house. Mason kept pace with her, the puppy scampering between them. She nodded her head again.

“Lila told me that Keegan was leaving the country and not coming back. I was wondering, did he tell you that?”

“He said he didn’t want to go, but Webb was making him.”

“You offered to go with him, but he said no, didn’t he? Did he tell you that if he was going to take anyone, he’d take Lila?”

“If he wanted that skinny bitch, he could have her. It made no difference to me.”

“It will make a lot of difference to the police,” Mason said. “For starters, it means he didn’t need a lawyer. So he must have known someone who did, someone he wanted to help out even if he was dumping her. And, it means he was the second guy you put out for who crapped on you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carol said, swallowing hard and glancing at her front door. “I have to go.” She turned away, but Mason grabbed her arm.

“The police are going to compare the bullets that killed Keegan and your husband to see if they were fired from the same gun. When they get a match, they’re going to drive down this street and knock down your door.”

“What do you want?” she asked, her face trembling.

“I want to tell Avery Fish’s daughters that their father wasn’t a killer.”

“I can’t help you,” she said, pulling her arm free.

“Sure you can. Tell me if I’ve got it right. Let’s start with Charles Rockley. You and Vince cooked up your lawsuit to get even with Galaxy-maybe you even set poor Rockley up. Then everything came apart when Lari Prillman exposed your affair with Keegan. You were afraid Rockley was going to get away with it.”

Carol’s face turned red, her mouth turning down. “He raped me!”

“That’s your story. The jury might even believe you. Trouble is you waited so long to kill Rockley that it looks premeditated instead of in the heat of the moment. Especially since you cut off his head and his hands and stuffed him in the trunk of Avery Fish’s car.”

She dropped the newspaper, covering her face with her hands, her body convulsing. The tremors passed and her arms fell to her sides.

“I didn’t cut him up,” she murmured.

“Was it Keegan?”

She nodded, barely moving her head. “He said he’d seen it done on The Sopranos and it would make it impossible to identify the body.”

“Why did he put the body in Fish’s car?”

“He said he’d seen Fish on TV. The guy was already in trouble. He said that would really throw the cops off.”

“Did he leak Rockley’s identity to the press?”

“That was Vince’s idea. He said it would put the heat on Galaxy and it might help with my case.”

Mason wasn’t surprised that Carol had told Bongiovanni what she’d done. That explained why Bongiovanni had been so quick to assure Mason of Carol’s innocence, claiming that he too had received an anonymous tip and offering to work with Mason. No doubt Bongiovanni would refuse to testify against Carol, claiming that anything she said to him about Rockley was protected by the attorney-client privilege.

“When Keegan told you he was trading you in for Lila Collins and leaving the country, it must have been too much to take. I’ll bet killing him was a little easier after you had your first murder under your belt. Then, when your husband kept beating you, you knew just how to make him stop.”

The puppy nipped at her slippers. She scooped him up, stroked his neck, and held him to her breast, her eyes red but dry, a fresh defiance straightening her spine.

“They were shits. All three of them. They looked at me and all they saw was tits and ass. Well, they won’t see any of that anymore. Johnny said you’re supposed to be the best. Will you help me?”

Mason picked up the newspaper. Rachel’s story was on the front page above the fold. He tucked the paper under his arm as a convoy of police cars turned the corner. Detectives Griswold and Cates got out of one car, followed by Samantha Greer in another. A half dozen uniformed cops began securing the scene.

“I almost wish I could,” Mason told her.

He walked away as Griswold read her rights to her.

Kelly Holt had destroyed Ed Fiori’s tapes. Vanessa Carter had blackmailed Mason with a lie that she was being blackmailed. She didn’t want his money. Instead, she wanted to do to him what he had done to her, and he had obliged, ruining his career with a confession that shielded her from the fallout. He thought back over the last eight days. She had played him perfectly. Fish had taught him that a con worked best when the mark wanted to believe it. Mason not only had feared that he would one day pay the price for what he’d done, he knew that he should. He was low-hanging fruit and she had picked him clean.

The judge’s voice message said that she was filling in at the Jackson County Courthouse. Mason found her there, clothed in a black robe, sitting on the bench, dispensing justice.

The courtroom had the latest in technology. The judge’s bench and the counsel tables were equipped with computers. The court reporter used a computer to produce a real-time transcript that also fed into a computer in her office so she could monitor proceedings even if she wasn’t in the courtroom.

The county had just installed an experimental voice-activated system to back up the court reporter. The court reporter or the judge or the lawyers could turn it on when they argued matters at the judge’s bench outside the hearing of the jury. The system recorded what was said and instantly converted it to a transcript.

It was motion day, which meant that lawyers were lined up, taking their turns to be heard on various motions in their cases. The low hum of conversations among the lawyers waiting for their cases to be called disappeared when Mason walked in and took a seat at the rear of the courtroom. The other lawyers were all in uniform, wearing dark suits and starched shirts. He was dressed in jeans and a striped shirt. No one sat near him. No one talked to him. They looked away, resuming their conversations. He didn’t exist.

He waited until the last group filed out. Judge Carter nodded at the court reporter and her bailiff, telling them they were excused.

“Mr. Mason,” Judge Carter said.

Mason rose and approached the bench. She looked down on him from her perch, her face radiant, her black eye healed, not noticing when he pressed the button for the voice-activated court-reporting system.

“Your eye,” Mason said. “You told me the blackmailer confronted you in your garage and hit you.”