Joel Goldman - Deadlocked

Sandra crossed the room, standing on the other side of the desk. She clutched the strap of the purse strung over her shoulder like it was a ripcord on a parachute, her other hand palm down on the desk, steadying herself. The tremors at the corners of her mouth looked like fault lines.

She shook her head. "Whatever you just shoved into that drawer will have to wait until morning. We need to talk now."

Mason took a deep breath. His parents had died forty years ago. Sandra was in trouble or headed there in a hurry. That was plain. Putting her and his clients on hold while he figured out what had possessed his father wouldn't bring his parents back. He could leave the accident report in his drawer and never take it out again. Or he could try to make sense of it. What he did about his parents and when he did it wouldn't change a thing. Besides, from the look of her Sandra wasn't going anywhere.

"Okay," he told her. "You called this meeting. What's so important?"

"Whitney King has agreed to meet with you."

"Alone?" Mason asked.

Sandra swallowed. "Yes. I'll be there, but in another room."

Mason finished his bottle of water. "Why didn't he take your advice and tell me to pound sand?"

"Because he's got more testosterone than sense. Going one-on-one with you appeals to his puerile instincts. He wants to do it tonight at his office," she said, coming as close to begging as he'd ever heard her.

Sandra carried a knife in her purse. Unlike a lot of women who carried weapons for self-protection, she knew how to use it and wouldn't hesitate. She didn't rattle easily, but she was barely able to stop from shaking.

"You don't have to represent him," Mason said. "You know that. You can quit. Let him find someone else."

"I don't quit, Lou. You know that. Besides, Whitney has a certain charm that comes from having enough money to get into enough trouble to make getting him out of it worthwhile," she said.

"Then why do you look more swept away than swept off your feet? And why were you checking up on my missing client after giving me the lecture on ethics?"

"I didn't break any rules," she snapped. "Mary wasn't home. If she had been, I would have told her to call you."

"But you had to see for yourself, didn't you?" Mason asked her.

"Yeah," Sandra answered. "I always do and sometimes I don't like what I see. Let's get going. I'll drive. I'm parked in front."

Mason followed Sandra through the club. Blues was back behind the bar, polishing a glass, listening to a guy on a stool spin a story, watching them pass. Mason met his look, both of them wearing masks. Blues poured his customer a drink, not spilling a drop, not taking his eyes from Mason's back until the door closed behind him.

Sandra pulled out into traffic and whipped around a driver that had slowed down in front of the Uptown Theatre, an art deco remnant from the fifties with a wraparound marquee above the doors. Mason had gone there as a kid to watch monster movies. It had been rehabbed into a venue for rock bands, Bar Mitzvah parties, and book signings, one of each advertised for the coming week.

Sandra was dodging traffic and Mason's questions. He wasn't going for a ride with her without pushing harder for answers.

"Eight of the twelve jurors who acquitted Whitney are dead," Mason said. "One was named Sonni Efron. She was shot in the face last week. Frances Peterson was another one.

She was shot in the face today. Dress it up all you want, Sandra. Whitney's a bad man and you know it."

She gave him a sharp glance that said she'd considered the possibility enough to worry about it. "You think he's bad enough to kill the people who acquitted him?"

"I do," Mason said. "Especially if he fixed the jury and didn't want anyone to find out."

"Whitney was seventeen years old when the trial took place," she said, the words a last plea with herself, not an argument with him.

"So he was a child prodigy," Mason said.

Sandra slipped through traffic, winding through the shops and restaurants on the Plaza. She stopped for a string of tourists crossing the street aiming for the Cheesecake Factory, gunning her Lexus past the last straggler. Someone pulled out of a parking space on Ward Parkway along Brush Creek. Sandra cut off another driver to snag the spot. She got out of the car, slammed her door, and walked to the edge of the creek, arms folded over her heaving chest.

Brush Creek was a quiet canal, broad grassy banks sloping up to the street on either side. The Plaza was on the north shore, its Spanish-inspired architecture and outdoor sculpture lending a cosmopolitan backdrop. Postwar brownstone apartment buildings converted into condos lined the south shore. People jogged on paths alongside the water, ignoring the heat. Gondolas floated past, carrying passengers who had nothing better to do with twenty-five dollars. The last fingers of sunlight laid golden tracks on the water.

"Daniel Boone trapped beaver on this creek in the early eighteen hundreds," Mason said, standing at Sandra's shoulder. "Can you believe that? Tom Pendergast paved it with concrete in the ninteen thirties. Some people think he tossed a few of his political opponents into the cement before it dried."

"You'd make a great tour guide," Sandra told him, biting her lip, not looking at him.

"I can't help you if you don't talk to me," Mason told her.

Sandra turned to face him, her hand on his cheek, a quiver rippling along her jaw. "Good old Lou," she said. "You'll be using that line on women until you're too old to remember why."

Mason took her by the wrist, pulling her hand away. "If it's about Mary, where she is, what's happened to her, you've got to tell me."

"I don't know anything about Mary," she said, sticking her hands under her arms, studying Mason, arguing with herself, giving in. "Look, my firm represented Whitney and his family for a long time before I was hired. I spent the weekend reviewing the family files."

"You need to get a life," Mason told her with a teasing smile.

"I know you, Lou. You're going to sue Whitney and you're going to dig up every rock the family laid down before and after Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes were murdered. I was just getting ready."

"What did you find?"

She raked her fingers through her hair, tugging on the ends. "The more money a family has, the more twisted things get. I may have tumbled onto something that puts me in a very bad spot."

Despite what many people assumed, lawyers are governed by complex ethical rules that try to balance more than one right thing at a time. A lawyer can't disclose a prior crime by a client revealed in confidence but must disclose a client's intent to commit a crime in the future. If disclosing the future crime would reveal the prior crime, things get complicated. If the disclosures could get you killed, survival becomes more important than ethics. Mason read Sandra's dilemma in the flutter of her eyes.

"Whitney's past runs all the way to the present," Mason said gently, "and you can't cut one off from the other."

She nodded, adding, "It's not just Whitney."

Sandra's cell phone rang. She took it off the clip on her belt, answering and listening. Her chin was on her chest, her shoulders slack. "Okay. I understand," she said with a grim voice. She closed the phone and started toward her car. "Come on," she added over her shoulder. "We're late."

"Was that Whitney?" Mason asked, barely closing his door before Sandra was back in traffic.

"No. It was Dixon Smith. He's a former federal prosecutor who's on his own now. We're representing defendants in the same case," she answered, keeping her eyes straight ahead, enforcing a brittle calm.

"Okay," Mason said. "Let's get back to Whitney and his family's files."