Deadlocked (Lou Mason Thrillers)

by Joel Goldman

  He knocked on the front door and jiggled the knob, a combination of pretense and wishful thinking that roused no one. The back door was still unlocked, the air in the house musty and stale. He moved slowly through each room, looking for things he hadn't seen before, finding only his images of Mary.

  He first saw her at her son's execution, a slight woman compressed by her grief. Two days later, at his office, she had shown a lock-jawed determination to see justice done for her son. The last time he'd seen her had been in this house surrounded by her memories, an ordinary woman in an ordinary place carrying an extraordinary burden.

  She had asked then if he was going to drop her case. He promised her that he wouldn't. He had made the same promise to Nick, though he wasn't sure he was keeping either promise. Walking through Mary's house, he realized that he hadn't dropped their cases. He'd been kicked off of them by Sandra's murder, forced to worry more about saving himself than serving his clients.

  Perhaps, he thought, Sandra hadn't been killed to keep her quiet. Maybe she'd been nothing more than a pawn in a deadly strategy to eliminate Mason as a threat. It would have been simpler just to kill him, though setting him up to take the fall for her murder would do just that. The state would kill Mason, making him the second innocent man to be executed for a murder committed by Whitney King. If Mason was right, Whitney King had redefined what it meant to work the system.

  Everything in Mary's house was as it had been on Mason's first visit. Nothing was out of place. Her bed was made. Her clothes were undisturbed. The copy of People magazine was where Mason had left it after he had spent an evening waiting for Mary to come home. It all appeared as he had left it until he stopped at the aquarium to feed the fish, staring at the water until he realized the fish were gone.

  "What the hell?" Mason said out loud.

  The deep-sea diver stared back at him, alone in the tank.

  Chapter 38

  Mary was alive. That was the only conclusion Mason could reach. No one else would have bothered to retrieve the fish. He discounted the possibility that the fish died and someone else threw them away. He raced through his reasoning, checking for flaws, hitting one head on. If the police were investigating Mary's disappearance, they could have gotten a warrant to search her house, discovered that the fish were dead and disposed of them.

  He paced back and forth in front of the aquarium, flipping open his cell phone and calling Samantha Greer on hers.

  "Sam, it's Lou."

  "How could you be so stupid?" she asked.

  "About what?" he asked, stunned by her vehemence.

  "The grand jury!" she said, unable to hide her exasperation. "Ortiz couldn't wait to tell me. Honest to God, Lou. What were you thinking?"

  "That I'm innocent. That I've gotten nothing to hide and that the system protects the innocent."

  "Fractured fairy tales and you know it as well as anyone does," Samantha said.

  "Hey, you're supposed to be on Ortiz's side, not mine."

  "I know," she said. "I am on his side. I investigated the crime scene. I found your gun. But I don't want you to be guilty and, even if you are guilty, I don't want you to make it so easy for Ortiz to nail you."

  "I had to spot him a few points to make it a fair fight," Mason said.

  "Don't even try that crap with me, Lou," she said. "Ortiz is very good and you're not defending yourself. You're the defendant. Dixon Smith is your lawyer."

  Mason forgot about Mary's fish for the moment. "You make being defended by Dixon sound almost as bad as being arrested. What do you hear about him?"

  Samantha hesitated, cleared her throat. "Nothing. Forget it," she said. "He's fine, from what I hear."

  "Okay," Mason said. "Now get back on my side and tell me what you really hear."

  "He's your guy," Samantha said. "Why did you hire him if you're worried about what I've heard?"

  "Remember me? I'm the guy charged with murder who waived my right against self-incrimination. You think I'm smart enough to pick the right lawyer to defend me?"

  Samantha laughed. Mason was pleased at the sound of her voice. In spite of their luckless romantic history, he and Samantha had been able to hold onto their friendship. He needed that now.

  "Good point," she said. "Okay, I hear that he practices at the edges. Maybe gets too close to his clients."

  Mason knew what she meant. Criminal defense lawyers were not immune to the temptations sometimes offered to them by their clients, especially those whose illegal operations generated wholesale amounts of cash, drugs and women—or men—depending on the lawyer's gender and inclinations. A lawyer who got too close to his clients could end up in business with them whether he liked it or not.

  "Any particular client?" Mason asked. Samantha hesitated again, Mason pressing her. "C'mon Sam," he said. "If I've got a problem, I need to know now, not when I'm writing appeals from death row."

  "Damon Parker."

  "The guy who owns Golden Years, the nursing home guy?" Mason asked, the muscles in his neck tightening.

  "Yeah. That Damon Parker. He's made a fortune developing something he calls Life Care Communities. He builds condos, assisted living apartments, nursing homes, and psychiatric hospitals with Alzheimer's disease units. All under one roof. Signs people up for the last part of the downhill slide. All the way from independent living to the graveyard. When their insurance or Medicare kicks in, he moves them back and forth from the hospital to the nursing home as each round of coverage runs out."

  "What's illegal about that if the insurance companies or Medicare are supposed to pay for the care?"

  "That's not the problem. The problem is billing for care that isn't given, like therapy given to dead patients, or care that isn't needed, like claiming that everyone over the age of seventy has Alzheimer's. It's a federal investigation so I only know what I hear."

  "Then how do you know anything about it at all?" She didn't answer, Mason filling in the blanks. "Ortiz told you after Dixon Smith waxed him at my arraignment. Ortiz has friends in the U.S. attorney's office. They must have told him. Smith used to be an assistant U.S. attorney until he quit and started his own practice."

  "He didn't quit, Lou," Samantha said softly. "I'm sorry, but that's all I can tell you and I shouldn't have told you that much."

  "I'm glad you did," he said. "You have to admit, though, he did a great job for me at the arraignment."

  "So what? He got you out on bail so you could hand Ortiz your head in front of the grand jury!" she snapped, before apologizing. "I'm sorry, Lou. You've got enough problems without me yelling at you too, but it's not too late to hire someone else."

  "I'll keep that in mind," Mason answered, remembering that he'd given similar advice to Sandra Connelly, telling her she could quit representing Whitney King. Sandra wasn't ready to let go of King and he wasn't ready to fire Smith.

  Smith's story that Sandra Connelly had asked him to look into whether Whitney King's mother belonged in a nursing home was suddenly more interesting to Mason. Especially the part about Smith's client firing him when he made the inquiry. His Aunt Claire's lesson about mixing truth and lies reverberated again. If he fired Smith, he wouldn't be able to separate those facts from fiction.

  "You didn't call to get a reference for your lawyer," Samantha said. "What do you want?"

  He'd stopped pacing without realizing it, finding himself staring again at the aquarium. "Has anything happened with the missing person's report I filed on Mary Kowalczyk?" he asked.

  "I talked to the detective on the case today. Her name is Barbara Wilson. She's got a stack of reports and yours is on it."

  "At the bottom?" Mason asked.

  "Dead last," she answered. "She's got more to read than she'll ever have time for. She does a great job with the cases she gets to, but she's overworked and underpaid."

  "That's great!" Mason said.

  "You're kidding," Samantha said. "How can that be great?"

  "It's a real fish story. Remind me to tell you la
ter," Mason said.

  ***

  The online world was open for business every second of every day, converting distances formerly measured in miles to download times measured in seconds. Mickey Shanahan had convinced Mason to buy a laptop with a wireless Internet connection to use at home, explaining to Mason that he could be online whether he was working at his desk or sitting on the toilet.

  "I've got the Kansas City Star if I need something to do with my hands when I'm on the can," Mason had told him.

  "Think globally," Mickey had said. "You could read the New York Times and the Washington Post instead."

  "I'm a creature of habit. My bowels are used to the local paper," Mason told him.

  "Be careful, boss," Mickey had said. "Once you start planning your life around your bowels, you're doomed. You'll skip middle age and go straight to a soft food diet. You'll end up with one of those seven-day pill packs filled with fiber pills, vitamins, and stool softeners. You won't be able to shack up away from home because of all the crap you've got to take before you go to bed each night."

  It was easier to buy the laptop than argue with Mickey about his future. He and Abby had stocked each other's bathrooms with travel sets of their toiletries. It had been a gradual process, a few things added at a time, proving Mickey's point that spontaneous sleepovers became more difficult after the age of forty. After a while, he'd cleared a dresser drawer for her night things and underwear and she'd done the same for him. They had been easing toward living together while avoiding a decision whether to move into his place or hers. Mason had left her things where they were, unable to pack them up.

  Mickey taught him how to use the laptop and Mason had become a proficient surfer. He logged on while seated in his living room at the dining room table. He'd picked up Greek carryout on the way home, washed it down with a cold beer, and shoved the remains to the center of the table to make room for his computer. He kicked off his shoes, rubbing Tuffy's belly with his bare foot.

  Rachel Firestone's sources had said that King's mother, Victoria, had been a patient at the Golden Years Psychiatric Hospital since the death of her husband, Christopher King, his death coming on the heels of Whitney's acquittal in the Byrneses murder trial. Mason could understand how the combination of those events could fracture a sound psyche, though Victoria King's must have been eggshell thin to have left her institutionalized for the last fifteen years.

  Mason found the Golden Years Web site touting its caring staff and comfortable surroundings at its nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals located in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois. He clicked on the button for locations, selecting Lenexa, Kansas.

  The hospital and nursing home were located on a twenty-five-acre campus that included condos and assisted living apartments. A map showed directions to Golden Years, Mason noting that it was only a short distance from Burning Oak, the exclusive development where Whitney King lived. It was hard to fault a man for living close to his mother.

  Mason returned to the Golden Years home page, clicked on a link titled "About Us" and learned that the privately owned company was founded thirty years ago to—according to its mission statement—"provide special care for special people with special needs."

  There was a message from Damon Parker, the president of the company, spreading good cheer and compassion for the elderly and those suffering from mental illness and Alzheimer's. Parker's picture was pasted in the upper-righthand corner of the Web page, a thin-faced man with a Marine brush cut, black-rimmed glasses over narrow, hawkish eyes, and a smile that Mason was certain had been digitally enhanced. Parker looked to be in his late sixties, maybe early seventies, and Mason wondered whether he'd reserved his own Golden Years suite.

  After reading Parker's message, Mason clicked on the word "more" scripted in bright blue at the bottom of the page. The following Web pages recited the company's history and included photographs of the groundbreaking ceremony for the Lenexa location. Mason double-clicked on those photographs, enlarging them one at a time to fill his computer screen. He held the laptop up so he could study the pictures more closely, setting it down again when he saw what he was looking for.

  "Son of a bitch," he said, pressing too firmly on Tuffy's stomach, the dog snapping at Mason's toes. "Sorry, dog," Mason said, patting her on the head, "but you aren't going to believe this."

  Mason carried the laptop to the office he kept in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He attached a printer cable to the laptop, put a sheet of photo quality paper in the printer, and clicked print. A moment later, he had a glossy image of the ground-breaking ceremony, a sign reading "King Construction Company, General Contractor" clearly visible in the background. Mason had no trouble picking out Damon Parker. He had had the birdlike face, geek glasses, and flattop haircut a long time. Equally obvious was Christopher King, a dead ringer for his son Whitney. Both men were grinning, holding gold-tipped shovels and wearing spotless hard hats.

  A woman and a little boy stood behind Christopher King, the woman draping her hand across the boy's chest, the boy grasping a miniature shovel, gold-tipped like his father's. Mason savored the irony that Whitney's father had built a home for his wife without even knowing it.

  He carried the picture of little Whitney and his parents into his bedroom, comparing it to one of him and his parents Claire had given to him when he was a boy. It was more snapshot than portrait, a five-by-seven showing Mason on a swing set, his father pushing him from behind, his mother pretending to catch him. Claire had taken the picture a week before his parents were killed, the date written on the back. Mason kept the picture in a Plexiglas frame on the nightstand next to his bed, space shared with a framed picture of Abby.

  He sat on his bed, laying the King family picture aside, thinking of his fragmented past and his uncertain future. The phone rang, saving him from dipping too deeply into those waters. He let it ring twice before picking up.

  "Hello," he said, his thoughts still distant.

  Harry Ryman said, "Lou, I finally got the story on that license plate you asked me to run. Sorry it took all week, but like I told you, the chief has made it tough. The son of a bitch says the department isn't in the favor business."

  Mason stood, not taking his eyes from the picture of him and his parents. "You mean the license plate from the cemetery?"

  "What cemetery?" Harry asked. "You didn't say anything about a cemetery."

  "Sorry, Harry," Mason said. "What did you find out?"

  "The car is a Mercedes SUV registered to a woman named Judith Bartholow."

  "Did you get an address?" Mason asked, grabbing a pen.

  "I'm full service," Harry said reciting the address. Mason wrote it down on the back of the King picture. "Her name mean anything to you?" he asked Mason.

  "I hope so," Mason answered.

  Chapter 39

  There were times in a case when Mason knew he was on the verge of making sense out of the contradictory, indifferent, and depraved impulses that led people to lie, cheat, and kill. It was an urgent, irresistible sensation that reminded him of when he used to fly down the long, steep, sweeping curve of Ward Parkway from Fifty-fifth Street to the Plaza.

  It was the summer before his junior year in high school when the only thing he could drive was a ten-speed bike. In those days before the Plaza went upscale, Sears occupied a four-story building on the west end of Nichols Road, the shopping district's main drag. Mason worked on every floor and in every department from electrical to women's hose, setting a record for the most men's cologne sold the day before Father's Day.

  Ward Parkway was a wide boulevard divided by a lush, green median. South of Fifty-fifth, it carried traffic on a level plane to the homes of the urban landed gentry. North of Fifty-fifth Street it became a bike rider's bobsled run, fast and furious. Mason would kick his bike into high gear just before he crossed Fifty-fifth Street, churning the pedals, making his spokes blur as he launched himself down the stretch he called "The Chute."

  He hunched over the h
andlebars, molding his body to the frame, elbows tight to his sides like a jockey on the home stretch. His necktie whipped over his shoulder, the wind digging tears out of the corners of his eyes as he leaned into the curve, pounding the pedals, shooting past cars on his left. He flew, skinny tires spinning over the pavement, teasing gravity and fate, knowing that a misplaced pebble or an unseen crack in the pavement could throw him under the tires of the cars chasing him.

  When he came out of the chute and the road flattened again, he straightened in his saddle, his arm raised, his fist clenched in triumph, as he slowed for a leisurely finish alongside Brush Creek. It was his first memory of testing himself against things that threatened him.

  The need to measure himself, the need to feel the heat, the urge to raise his clenched fist in victory had driven him to take chances others wouldn't. Sometimes it made the difference for a client threatened by a more powerful adversary—the state. Sometimes it made the difference when the adversary was personal and threatened him. Sometimes it raised the stakes too high, as it had with Abby.

  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.