by Joel Goldman
“And if he tries anything rough, we can tell him about the e-mail,” Mickey said.
“That is a very bad idea. If he knows about the e-mail, he can cancel it.”
“So what do we do if he tries anything rough?”
“Duck,” Mason said.
“I’ll try to remember that. Does Fiora know we’re coming?”
“Yeah. I called the casino this afternoon and left a message. I’m expecting the VIP treatment.”
Mason used valet parking to give Fiora the added comfort of holding his car keys, wanting Fiora to think the odds were all with the house on the game they were about to play. Mason had to press, but not too hard, take risks, but not too great.
Tony Manzerio was waiting for them. He didn’t speak, settling for the universal sign language of goons everywhere—a nod of the head that meant follow me and keep your mouth shut.
Mason and Mickey did as they were nodded to do, trailing a respectful five steps behind Manzerio. People moved out of Manzerio’s way without being told or nodded. The man was large enough and his eyes were dead enough to trigger the flight side of the survival impulse, Mason catching a few there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I expressions.
They took an elevator marked Private, opened a door marked Authorized Personnel Only, and walked down a corridor marked Secure Area. None of which made Mason feel safe.
Manzerio led Mason and Mickey into Fiora’s office. A window looked out over the Missouri River, a black view without dimension or detail. Fiora sat at a poker table playing solitaire.
“Did you search them?” he asked without looking up.
Manzerio didn’t answer. Instead, he ran his porterhouse-sized hands up and down their sides, torsos, legs, and arms.
“Nothin’. No guns. No wires.”
“Wait outside.”
Fiora turned over the facedown cards until he found the one he wanted. Smiling, he ran through the rest of the cards until they were all arranged in order.
“How about that! I won again.”
“Odds always favor the house, but cheating takes the suspense out of it,” Mason said.
“I’m a businessman, Mason, not a gambler. The craps table is for suckers. I need an edge, I take it. I don’t make business a game of chance.”
“I like to think of it as supply and demand. The market moves buyers and sellers to the middle, where they can make a deal.”
“Your message said you wanted to make a trade. What do I have that you would want?”
“My law practice.”
“How could I possibly have your law practice?”
“It’s on the hard drive you ripped out of my computer last night. Client files, my receivables, my payables. The works.”
“That must be inconvenient for you. What’s the matter? Didn’t you back your stuff up? I don’t know much, but I know that much. I got people working for me that don’t do nothing but back shit up.”
“Actually, I did back up one thing.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the flash drive. “It’s not much, really. Just some bank records you might be interested in.”
Fiora’s eyes hardened. “You’re taking a hell of a risk coming to my place offering to trade my records to me. Why don’t I just have Tony come in here and take that drive and throw your ass in the river?”
Mason didn’t flinch. “You said it yourself. You’re a businessman. Buy, sell, trade, but don’t take chances. I’m the same way. I was out of line meddling in your business and I’m sorry. Last night, you convinced me that you had nothing to do with Jack Cullan’s murder. I don’t need to clutter up the defense of my client with extraneous bullshit that the judge won’t let me get into evidence anyway. I’m offering you this flash drive in good faith, the same way you gave me the pictures of Beth Harrell. All I want is my hard drive.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that you don’t have another copy of this stashed someplace?”
“I can’t help it if you’re not a believer. I’m a lawyer, not a rabbi.”
Fiora studied Mason for a minute. “Come over here, Rabbi Mason. I want to show you something.”
Mason joined Fiora at the window. The light from inside the office and the lack of light outside made the view opaque.
“Is there something I should be looking at?”
“You might find this interesting.” There were two switches next to the window. Fiora hit one, and the office went dark. He hit the other, and the prow of the boat where Mason had celebrated New Year’s Eve was bathed in a spotlight. “Nice view, don’t you think?”
Mason repressed an involuntary shudder. “It’s terrific. What’s your point?”
“Every public area of this boat is under constant video surveillance. I want to know everything that happens on my boat. That prow is a very popular spot. Lovers like to make out there. Losers like to jump off. We got to watch it all the time.”
“It must be tough to get good video in the dark.”
“Nah! We got these low-light cameras make it practically like your living room. The technology is fantastic. This case of yours works out okay, you come back and we’ll watch some home movies. What do you say?”
Fiora was giving Mason a mixed message. He was telling Mason that he knew what had happened on New Year’s Eve and still had the proof. Maybe it was an offer to tell him who had tried to kill him, and maybe it was a not-so-subtle threat.
“You serve popcorn?”
Fiora laughed once without conviction. “You’re good with the jokes. Don’t be too funny, Rabbi Mason. You and your altar boy have a seat, make yourselves comfortable. I got to check with my computer people and see what they’ve done with your hard drive. It may be they already wiped it clean. In the meantime, why don’t you give me that flash drive of yours so I can have them check it out?”
Mason grinned at Fiora and tossed the drive to him. “This one is blank. Bring me my hard drive and a computer. Mickey will check it out. If everything is on it but your records, Mickey will get you the real flash drive.”
Fiora chuckled. “Careful you don’t hit on sixteen and go bust.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Fiora left Mason and Mickey in his office. Mason picked up Fiora’s deck of cards and looked at Mickey.
“Gin rummy. A buck a point. I’ll charge your losses as an advance against your salary.”
“That’s really generous of you. I haven’t played cards since I was a kid. You’ll have to remind me of the rules.”
Mason sat at the poker table and motioned Mickey to do the same, wondering how many scams Mickey could run at one time. “Am I about to get cleaned out?”
“Right down to your socks, boss. Deal.”
By the time Fiora and Manzerio returned an hour later, Mason was down two hundred and fifty dollars. They watched while Mickey shuffled the cards as if he’d been born with them in his hands, fanning them, making bridges, palming top cards and bottom cards, and marking the corners of other cards with his thumbnail.
“Hey, kid,” Fiora said, “you get tired of working for this stiff, I got a place for you at one of our tables.”
“He can’t quit,” Mason said. “He’s got to give me a chance to win my money back.”
“Those words are the secret of my success,” Fiora said. “That, and never trusting anybody, especially a schmuck lawyer who thinks he can come into my place and flimflam me like I was a refugee from a Shriners convention.”
“I told you the flash drive was blank and that I’d get you the real one. I’m not trying to con you.”
“Then you are a dumber cocksucker than I gave you credit for.” Fiora stuck his hand out to Manzerio, who gave him a stack of papers. “Tony took another tour of your office. Seems you forgot to mention the copy of my bank records you printed out, you stupid fuck! I ought to have Tony beat you right up to the limit!”
Fiora’s face turned purple as he bit off each word, casting flecks of spittle like confetti at a parade. Mason hung his head sheepish
ly, letting Fiora’s outburst pass.
“Well, what the fuck do you have to tell me now, Rabbi Bullshit?”
“Look, I’m sorry,” Mason began. “I’m out of my league here. It was my insurance policy, but that’s it. You’ve got everything now. Let’s finish our business and I’ll get out of here.”
“You’ll be carried out of here! Why should I trade you anything but your fucking life?”
“Because you don’t kill people, that’s why. You said so yourself. I’ve got to have my files back or I’m out of business. You need your files back or you’re out of business. It’s not very complicated.”
Fiora’s natural color seeped back into his face as he rolled the papers into a cylinder and thumped them against his palm. “Don’t fuck with me, Mason. I’m telling you, do not fuck with me. You got that, Rabbi?”
He smacked Mason’s head with the rolled papers. Mason grabbed Fiora’s wrist and pulled his arm down to the table, Fiora wincing, as much in shock as in pain. Manzerio took a step toward Mason, who released his grip. Fiora yanked his wrist from Mason’s hand while motioning Manzerio to stay where he was with his other.
“I got it, Ed,” Mason said so softly that Manzerio couldn’t hear him. “Now you get this. You hit me again, and you can spend the rest of your fucking life wondering who’s going to end up with that flash drive.”
Fiora held Mason’s sharp stare. “You got balls, Mason. I give you that. I give you that. Tony, have that four-eyed geek bring the computer in here. Let’s get this over with.”
A short time later, Mickey booted up the computer and searched the hard drive for its contents. “It’s got everything but the bank records, boss. You want me to remove the hard drive?”
“Give Fiora the other flash drive first, and let him see what’s on it.”
Mickey un-tucked his shirt and reached behind to the small of his back where he had taped the drive. He popped it into the computer and stood back as Fiora’s bank accounts flashed across the screen.
“Good enough?” Mason asked.
“Good enough,” Fiora said. “You can pull the hard drive out. Tony, give the kid the tools.”
Mason said, “I’m glad we were able to work this out.”
“Don’t press your luck,” Fiora told him.
“There is one other thing,” Mason said.
“It better not be another flash drive.”
“It’s not. It’s a favor. The one you said you owed me for stopping Beth Harrell from shooting you.”
“Mason, you are too much. You bust my balls on this bank account shit, and then you got even more balls to ask me for a favor.”
“I saved your life last night. That was a favor. This was business. You owe me the favor.”
Fiora sighed, trapped by his own curious ethics. “What is it?”
“I want my client released on bail.”
“Sorry, I can’t do it.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re wired into the prosecutor’s office. That’s how you knew they were going to offer Blues a plea bargain. Hell, it may have been your idea to begin with. I think I may know who has Cullan’s files. I can’t get to them myself and it’s just as risky for you. Blues can get them. If there’s nothing in your file that links you to Cullan’s murder, you can have it. No copies and no questions. My client is innocent. I need those files to prove it.”
“You aren’t asking for much, are you?”
“I need an edge, I take it,” Mason said. “The assistant prosecutor and I are meeting with Judge Carter on Monday morning at eight o’clock. I want Blues released on bail before ten. Make it happen.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
“That was extremely cool, dude,” Mickey said.
They had just pulled away from the curb at the casino, and Mickey was fiddling with the radio, looking for some celebration tunes.
“Maybe. I just conspired with Ed Fiora to improperly influence a judge to get Blues out on bail. Fiora probably has the whole thing on tape. That doesn’t sound so cool to me.”
“Then why did you make the play?”
“It’s the only one I had.”
“That’s bad public relations, man.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Let me tell you a story. I was conceived on the Fourth of July under a lucky star. My mother, Libby, spotted it over my father’s shoulder from the backseat of his ragtop Firebird.”
“I like the car better than the story.”
“Dude! Chill and pay attention. My mother said the star was Altair and that it was found in the wing of the constellation Aquila the Eagle. Aquila was the mythical bird who helped Jupiter crush the Titans and seize control of the universe.”
“So you’re Aquila and I’m Jupiter?”
“You tell me. Anyway, Altair was a shepherd in love with another star, Vega, who was stranded on the western side of the Milky Way. Once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, the lovers united across the heavens.”
“So are you the son of a shepherd or the son of a star?”
“Libby was always a little vague about whether Altair started out as an eagle’s wing and ended up a shepherd or vice versa. I figured he was an early cross-dresser, kind of a mythological RuPaul.”
“No doubt the kind of role model that made you what you are today,” Mason said.
“My mother told me the story the first time I asked about my father. I may have been a kid, but I knew the difference between an answer and a story. So I asked again. She told me I had two choices. Either my mother got knocked up in the backseat of a Firebird on a hot July night sticky enough to melt bugs together, and my father, who had great shoulders but no spine, ran out on us. Or I was conceived under a lucky star and I was destined for great deeds and greater love.”
“Which one did you choose?”
“Adventure and babes. Either you just conspired with Ed Fiora to improperly influence a judge to get Blues out of jail, or you simply asked a friend if he’d put in a good word with the prosecutor to consider a reasonable bail for Blues. That’s public relations.”
Mason shook his head. “Don’t ever run for office, Mickey.”
“Why not, man?”
“You just might win.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Monday morning was bleak. The sun’s weekend cameo appearance had not been renewed for an extended run. Heavy clouds, thick and dusky, had rolled in from the north overnight, limiting the day’s light to the perpetual gray of dawn. A cold front swept along at ground level, driving a gnawing, eroding wind.
Mason huddled in his Jeep, waiting for a stoplight to change and wondering whether the heater would kick in before he got to the courthouse. The day matched the mood of dark desperation that had gripped him since his fall from grace at Ed Fiora’s feet.
Mickey’s flexible ethic hadn’t soothed his wounded conscience. He knew where the line was drawn between zealous advocacy for his client and the dark side. Even so, he’d stepped over it. It wasn’t a movable line, one that could be redrawn in the sand or one over which he could hop back and forth with a moral pogo stick.
He’d replayed Blues’s case a thousand times in the last thirty-six hours, each time he’d come to the same fork in the road, and each time he’d made the same choice. Not that it gave him much comfort. Neither did the replays that he often watched with his mind’s eye of the man he’d killed more than a year ago. Then he’d been cornered, left without a choice. This time, there may have been another way out, but he hadn’t been able to find it.
Mason knew that Ed Fiora wouldn’t treat Mason’s favor as a balancing of the books. Instead, he would record it as an investment with an interest rate that would make a loan shark blush. Fiora would come to collect one day unless Mason could wipe the ledger clean once and for all.
Icy pellets peppered Mason’s windshield as he parked in the lot across the street from the courthouse. He cursed the weather and his own weakness as he cautiously made his way across
the slick pavement.
Patrick Ortiz was waiting in the hallway outside Judge Carter’s chambers when Mason arrived, sipping a cup of coffee, studying notes on his legal pad. Mason had decided to let Ortiz raise the issue of bail, not wanting to be too obvious with his knowledge that the fix was in. He knew that Ortiz wouldn’t be happy, and he didn’t want to rub his face in it.
“Morning, Patrick.”
“Lou.”
Ortiz greeted him with equal neutrality. They stood like two commuters waiting for the train, strangers avoiding eye contact and conversation, until the outer door to the judge’s chambers opened and her secretary summoned them inside.
Judge Carter was waiting for them in her chambers, seated behind her desk, signing orders from the previous day’s hearings. Her black robe was hanging on a coat hook. A half-eaten bagel and a plastic container of yogurt sat on the edge of her desk next to an empty coffee cup.
Judge Carter was fastidious in appearance and demeanor, impatient with the unprepared, and unsympathetic toward the guilty. Female African American judges were no longer a novelty, but a conservative Republican female African American state court judge who was on a short list for appointment to the federal bench was a rare phenomenon.
She had dark circles under her eyes, made darker by the contrast with her own rich coffee-colored skin. Mason had the sense that she’d either worked late the night before or gotten an early start this morning. Either way, she didn’t look like she was having a good day and he didn’t expect a warm reception.
“Sit down, Counselors,” she instructed, waving them into the leather chairs opposite her desk. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with statutes, appellate decisions, and treatises rose behind her, accenting her own imposing style. “Let’s talk about your case. You’re set for trial on Monday, March fourth. Tell me now if you’ll be ready for trial. I don’t like last-minute requests for continuances.”
“The people will be ready,” Ortiz said.
“The defense will be ready as well, Your Honor.”
