Joel Goldman - Deadlocked

When a case was about to come together like a double helix, he felt like he was flying down that hill again-that if he could only pedal a little faster, he'd come out of the chute like a rocket. He couldn't resist that sensation. Harry's call should have kicked him into high gear. Instead, it left him at the top of the hill, backpedaling and afraid.

He was afraid of what he might learn from Judith Bartholow. The accident investigation report had all but accused his father of killing himself and Mason's mother. How could his father have done such a thing, not just to them, but to him? Mason's throat filled as he searched the picture of his family for answers, finding none. He searched himself for anger, pity, and pain, finding only fear. What would he learn and what would it matter?

He turned the picture of the groundbreaking over, looking at it again. Whitney King was two years old in that picture, his father building for his future, his mother depending on it. He propped the picture alongside the one of him and his parents. Were they so different then? Neither picture hinted at any future calamities. They were, after all, only snapshots.

Saturday morning dawned bright and muggy, the humidity making the sky fuzzy. The heat wave may have broken, but it was still summer in Kansas City which meant that each day could turn ugly. The heat and humidity could make the air stand still or it could whip it into wild storm cells filled with tornadoes and microbursts that pulverized anything in its path.

Mason and Tuffy compromised on morning exercise, settling on a walk in Loose Park. In spite of their easy pace, he was dripping and she was panting when they headed for home.

A neighbor from across the street stood at the end of her driveway, dressed in her bathrobe, the morning paper clutched under her arm, glaring at Mason as he and the dog made their way up the block toward her. Her last name was Irwin. Her first name was something or other. She and her husband had two small children she had forbidden to enter Mason's yard and she had eagerly offered her opinion to the press that it was terrible to live so close to a killer. Her uncombed hair looked like snakes in flight, highlighting the fierceness in her pinched face and burning eyes as she waited with crossed arms for Mason to reach her.

"Mr. Mason," she said, stepping onto the sidewalk.

"Good morning, Mrs. Irwin," he answered. Mason wasn't much for formality, especially with his neighbors, but she had chosen the language and he went along rather than call her "something or other."

"What are you going to do?"

Tuffy sniffed at the woman's feet and circled back to Mason's side. Mason held on to her collar. "About what?"

"About all of this?" she answered. "About all of us. I'm afraid to let my children out of the house. We want you to sell your house, move away, and leave us alone!"

Mason sighed, looking up and down the street. "Who, exactly, is the we you are talking about?"

She wrapped her hand around the end of the rolled newspaper, taking a defensive step back. "Why, all of us," she stammered. "The whole block would be better off without. . without all of this."

"And what if I'm innocent, Mrs. Irwin?" he asked her. "What then? If I let you run me out of the house I've lived in all of my life and I'm innocent, what will you tell your kids? Who should they be afraid of then?"

She sputtered for a moment, backing up more, turning away. "I'm calling a lawyer today!"

"Let me know if you need a referral," Mason said.

Judith Bartholow lived in Leawood, a suburb that hugged the Kansas side of the state line with Missouri. Originally conceived as an exclusive enclave with restrictive covenants in deeds that would have prevented Mason or any other Jew or any African American from buying a house, it had grown into a prosperous municipality with demographics that made retailers foam at the mouth. The restrictive covenants were in the city's dustbin, though there still wasn't much color in the cul-de-sac.

An hour after Mason's chat with his neighbor, he turned onto Judith's block, cruising past large Country French and Tudor spreads with well-manicured lawns all being watered with carefully choreographed sprinkler systems. He wanted to get a feel for her before he decided what to do. Seeing where she lived was the best he could come up with on a Saturday morning, except maybe summoning the nerve to knock at her door.

He imagined her sitting at her kitchen table, having breakfast, opening the door when he knocked. She would greet him with open arms, apologizing for lost time, making up for it with answers to his questions. He knew it never happened that way and wouldn't this time, assuming he knocked at all.

Her subdivision was fairly new, carved out of a farmstead owned by one of the city's blue chip families that cashed in on the insatiable demand of people who wanted to live large. Built close to I-435, it was a magnet for the wealthy and those who thought they should be.

He parked in front of the house next to Judith's two-story beige Country French stone and stucco, its front windows catching the morning sun, bouncing the light back like diamonds. Multicolored summer flowers bloomed along the precisely landscaped perimeter shaded by mature trees the developer had been careful to preserve when the house was built.

Mason had a view of the driveway and three-car garage on the side of the house. The garage was open and empty except for a fleet of bicycles that occupied one of the three bays. A Mercedes SUV was parked in the driveway where a blonde, athletic-looking woman who he guessed was near his age was loading kids into the middle row of seats. Golf clubs, swim toys, and tennis rackets were loaded into the rear.

Mason double-checked the address Harry had given him. He had the right house, but he doubted that Judith Bartholow was the right woman. The woman he was looking for had some connection to his parents. That's why she had visited their grave and that's why she had to be older than the soccer mom he was spying on.

He was about to give up when an older woman came running out of the garage carrying another tennis racket, handing it to the younger woman who rewarded her with a kiss on the cheek before gunning the Mercedes down the driveway and past Mason like he was invisible. The older woman stood in the driveway, looking directly at Mason and not at the SUV disappearing behind him. She covered her heart with her hand, her shoulders drooping as she turned and quickly went back inside.

Nothing about the woman was familiar to Mason, though she acted as if she had recognized him. All he could tell was that she had dark hair, a slender frame, and a family. She could be anyone, but she wasn't, not if she had visited his parents' grave more often in the last two weeks than Mason had in the last two years.

The garage had room for another car that wasn't there. Mason assumed that the younger woman's husband was not at home, leaving the older woman alone in the house. He sat in his car debating whether to leave or knock on her door; the issue settled when he realized he was massaging the scar over his heart. The ache he felt wouldn't go away that easily.

The older woman opened the door almost the instant he knocked, as if she had watched him walk from his car to the house. Mason looked over her shoulder into the wide entry hall, a spiral staircase leading upstairs, the marble floor gleaming beneath a shiny brass chandelier. There was a long, low table along the wall behind her, a plant set in a clear glass vase, smooth stones like the one on his parents' grave lining the bottom.

The woman's oval face was troubled, her cheeks drawn; her deep brown eyes stretched open, darting glances to the street. She was taller than she'd looked from a distance, though half a foot shorter than Mason, and old enough to have known his parents. She was wearing khaki slacks and a white blouse open at the neck; a simple gold chain was her only jewelry. Her hair was too dark to be natural at her age, but apart from that concession to vanity, she'd trusted the years to treat her fairly and she wasn't disappointed. Even without makeup on a Saturday morning, he sensed a woman who'd turned heads in her youth. She straightened when she saw him, adding backbone to his instant image of her, though it wasn't enough to shake off her anxiety.