by Joel Goldman
“There’s been an awful lot of pretrial publicity. Are you going to ask for a change of venue?” she asked Mason.
“No. Hopefully, the press coverage will die down and we can get a fair jury.”
Mason had been pleased with the press coverage so far and was counting on the jury to have read and remembered the stories that cast doubt on the police investigation and Blues’s guilt.
“When we get to jury selection, you’ll both ask the jurors if they’ve read anything about the case, if they’ve made up their minds already, and if they can be fair. The ones who want to serve will answer no, no, and yes. The ones who want to go home or go to work will answer yes, yes, and no.”
Judge Carter had recited the truth about jury selection that every lawyer and judge wrestled with in every case. She said it with more resignation than humor, and the lawyers nodded their own understanding of the dilemma.
“Any other problems lurking out there on either side?” she asked them.
Mason kept silent, waiting for Ortiz to raise the question of bail.
“There is one issue,” Ortiz said. “Defense counsel is a suspect in an arson and a homicide that took place last Thursday night. In the event that he’s charged with either of those crimes, it could affect the trial date.”
Ortiz dropped his bombshell with a routine matter-of-factness that underscored its crippling impact. Mason’s stomach nose-dived as he stared at Ortiz, unable to contain his utter amazement. Ortiz looked straight ahead at the judge like someone who’d farted in a crowd and pretended not to notice. Judge Carter continued the exercise in understatement.
“I can see how that would be a problem. When does your office expect to make a decision whether to charge Mr. Mason? I’m certain he is as interested in knowing that as I am.”
“It’s a complicated case, Your Honor. The fire marshal is still investigating the cause and origin of the fire. The autopsy of the victim has been completed, but I don’t have the final report. The investigation is ongoing. It’s hard to know for sure when we’ll be ready to present something to the grand jury. Maybe Mr. Mason will withdraw as counsel and the defendant will hire somebody else so that we can stay on track for trial.”
Mason felt as if he were having an out-of-body experience, as if he’d left the room completely and crossed over to the twilight zone. Fiora had returned Mason’s lifesaving favor with his own life-threatening ploy. That was the only thing Mason could conclude. Either that, or Fiora had only had inside information from the prosecutor’s office, and not the juice to make Leonard Campbell give up his opposition to bail for Blues. Mason hated that he had compromised himself with Fiora. He hated it even more that his tactic had blown up in his face.
“Mr. Mason,” Judge Carter said, “I assume you are aware of the ongoing investigation. Have you discussed with your client the possibility that you may have to withdraw as his attorney?”
Mason breathed deeply, collecting himself. “No, I haven’t, Your Honor. I will speak to him today, but I doubt that he will want me to withdraw. I’m confident that I won’t be charged with either of those crimes. My client will consider the threat to charge me as just another part of the prosecutor’s strategy to pressure him into pleading guilty to a crime he didn’t commit and will insist that I remain his counsel. That’s how he and I view the prosecutor’s opposition to bail and that’s how I view these threatened charges.”
“What about that, Mr. Ortiz? Why has the state taken such a hard line on bail? I’ve reviewed the court file on this case. You’re relying on circumstantial evidence and one fingerprint for a capital murder case against a man with long-standing ties to the community and the financial ability to post a considerable bond. I’ve routinely granted bail in such cases. Why shouldn’t I do that now?”
Ortiz clenched the sides of his legal pad, frustrated at the change in direction Judge Carter had taken. “The defendant has a history of violent behavior. He’s a threat to the community, he’s—”
“Getting released on bail. Mr. Bluestone has never been convicted of a crime. He served his country in the military. He served this community as a police officer. I hope you are devoting as much time to proving your case against him as you are the one against his lawyer. I’m setting bond at $250,000. That will be all, gentlemen.”
Ortiz exploded out of his seat, nearly running over Judge Carter’s secretary on his way out. Mason rose more slowly, making certain that his legs weren’t shaking before he stood up. Judge Carter took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her desk drawer, leaned deeply into the back of her chair, and lit up. She blew the smoke out her nose, ignoring the No Smoking sign that hung on her wall.
“You know something, Mr. Mason?” she said. “You wasted a very expensive favor. I would have granted your client bail anyway.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Mason found the men’s room, bent over a sink, and splashed his face with cold water until his skin stung. He wiped his face with paper towels, scrubbing at invisible stains. He challenged his image in the mirror for an explanation but found no answers in his own bewilderment.
He had wasted more than an expensive favor. Fiora hadn’t gone through the prosecutor’s office. He’d gone straight to Judge Carter, and now Mason had wasted her career, laid her bare to whatever hold Fiora had on her. If he didn’t find a way to unring this bell, he would have wasted his own career as well.
At least Blues would be out of jail in a few hours and together they could try to find a way out of the wilderness. Mason found a room reserved for lawyers to meet with their witnesses, locked the door, and called Mickey, unable to stop the flutter in his voice.
“The judge ordered Blues released on bail.”
“You want me to cancel the e-mail to Rachel Firestone?”
“Immediately. Copy Fiora’s bank records on two different flash drives. I’ve got a safe-deposit box at City Bank. The key is in the top drawer of my desk. Put the drives in the box. I’ll call the bank and tell them that you are coming over to use the box. Then wait for me at the office.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Arrange for the bail and wait for them to process Blues’s release.”
“You don’t sound so good, boss. You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just trying to figure out the part where Jupiter crushes the Titans.”
“Don’t forget your wingman, boss. You don’t have to go it alone.”
Mason paused, realizing Mickey was right about that. He didn’t have to go it alone, but he didn’t want to take anyone else down with him.
“Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.”
Mason’s next call was to Carlos Guiterriz, his favorite bail bondsman. Carlos ran a one-man shop and took it personally when the prosecutor’s office opposed bond for a defendant, claiming they were conspiring against him in his effort to support three ex-wives and five children.
“Guiterriz Bail Bonds,” he said when Mason called.
“Carlos, it’s Lou Mason. I need a bond for a quarter of million this morning. Can you do that?”
“Who’s it for?”
“Wilson Bluestone, Jr., and let’s keep it our secret. The press will pick it up soon enough.”
“Holy shit, Lou! That is too sweet! How in the hell did you swing that?”
Mason had anticipated the question and knew that Carlos would repeat the answer a hundred times before the day was out.
“Judge Carter ordered the bail. She said she’d granted bail to other defendants in cases like Blues and that she wouldn’t treat him any differently.”
“I’ll bet that tight-ass Patrick Ortiz shit sideways!”
“It was a thing of wonder.” Guiterriz’s enthusiasm took the rough edge off Mason’s mood. “Blues will put up his bar as collateral, and I’ve got stocks worth fifty thousand bucks if you need more than that. Get the bond to the courthouse right away.”
Guiterriz laughed loudly enough that Mason had to hold his phone away from his
ear. “A thing of wonder,” he quoted Mason when he stopped laughing. “I would have put up the bond myself to see Ortiz take it in the shorts like that. Give me an hour.”
Mason wandered downstairs to the first-floor lobby of the courthouse, undecided how to kill time until Guiterriz showed up. He stood at the glass doors that fronted Twelfth Street and watched pedestrians and drivers fight to keep their balance as a new coating of ice descended on the city.
City hall was across the street. Mason hadn’t heard from Amy White since their meeting in the parking lot of the Hyatt Hotel. If Carl Zimmerman had been keeping her informed about the status of the homicide investigation, she might know something about Zimmerman’s whereabouts the night Shirley Parker was killed.
Clutching his topcoat around his collar, Mason made the crossing from the courthouse to city hall, shook the ice from his shoulders, and rode the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor in the hope that he would catch Amy in her office, finding her waiting for the elevator when it opened on her floor. She stepped onto the elevator and pushed the button for the first floor.
“Perfect timing,” Mason told her as he kept his finger on the button to open the elevator door. “I hoped that I would catch you in the office.”
“Lousy timing. Whatever it is, I don’t have time unless you have a hundred thousand tons of salt and a fleet of trucks to spread it. The weather service says we’re going to get two inches of ice and ten inches of snow in the next twelve hours.”
“I need to talk with you about something. It’s important.”
“What is it?”
“Carl Zimmerman.”
Amy’s mouth tightened as if a sudden pain had struck her. “You’ve got as long as the elevator takes to get downstairs.”
Mason punched the buttons for all twenty-eight floors. “This may take a while,” he said.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Mason and Amy eyed each other as the ancient elevator lurched to a halt at each of the next three floors. Amy broke off their eye contact with a nervous glance at her watch. The illuminated buttons on the elevator panel promised another twenty-five sea-sickening stops. Mason waited for Amy to speak first and set the course for his questions. The door opened on the twenty-fifth floor. Amy took a step toward the open door when Mason blocked her path.
“I’m getting off,” she insisted.
“Nope. A deal is a deal. All the questions I can ask until we hit bottom.”
Mason pushed the button to close the elevator door.
“Okay, fine,” she said without meaning either. “What about Carl Zimmerman?”
“You know him?”
“He’s a cop. Good enough?”
“Easy, Amy. How much snow can fall before we finish stopping at the next twenty-four floors? How do you know that he’s a cop?”
“The chief brought him to the mayor’s office after Jack Cullan was found dead. He and another detective—I think the other one was named Harry Ryman—were investigating the case and the mayor wanted some answers. The chief told Zimmerman to keep me updated on the case.”
Mason listened, his silence prompting her to continue.
“You know all that already or you wouldn’t be asking me,” she said. “And you can’t be so stupid to think I would lie about something you could so easily prove that I did know. So get to the point. You’re running out of floors.”
A barely operable ceiling fan wheezed and sucked warm, greasy air from the elevator shaft into the elevator, filling the car with the metallic taste of friction-heated oil. The odor combined with each ball-bouncing stop, turning their ride into a stomach-churning descent. Amy took off her knee-length navy wool coat and Burberry scarf and unbuttoned the high-necked collar of her dress. Her face was taking on a pasty, alien hue. Mason couldn’t tell if her suddenly green-gilled complexion was due to their rocky ride or his questions.
“When was the last time he checked in with you?”
“I didn’t log him into my PalmPilot. What difference does it make?”
“These are my floors, Amy,” Mason said, pointing to the glowing buttons. “I get to use them any way I want. When was the last time you talked to Carl Zimmerman?”
“Last week. I don’t remember the day, the time, or what we talked about.”
“The conversation I want to know about is one that I think you’d remember. It was about Jack Cullan’s files.”
“That’s a conversation I would have remembered, and I don’t. You’ve got three floors left. Make them count.”
“Where were you last Thursday night between six and ten o’clock?”
“Probably eating rubber chicken at a civic award dinner with the mayor, or home wishing I was.”
“Did Zimmerman call you that night?”
The elevator stopped at the first floor, the doors opened, and they stepped out into the lobby. Amy steadied herself with one hand against a pillar, gulping cleaner air. They could see the snow tumbling from the sky like feathers from a billion ruptured pillows.
“My God!” Amy said. “This is going to be the rush hour from hell.” Turning to Mason, she asked, “Do you have any idea how many complaints we will get by noon tomorrow that somebody’s street hasn’t been plowed?” Mason shook his head. “Everyone but the mayor will call. His street always gets plowed.” She touched her forehead with the back of her hand, wiping away sweat she must have imagined. “I’m sorry, Lou. What did you ask me?”
Mason smiled. He’d questioned too many witnesses too many times to be pushed off track.
“Did Carl Zimmerman call you last Thursday night?”
Amy drew on her reserves of exasperation. “Yes, no, maybe. I don’t remember. Should I?”
“That depends on whether Zimmerman needs an alibi for Shirley Parker’s murder.”
Amy studied Mason as she tied her scarf around her neck, cinching it securely under her chin, pulled her coat back on, and took her time carefully buttoning each button. She cocked her head to one side in a thoughtful pose and clasped her hands together.
“No,” she said at last. “I’m quite certain I didn’t talk to Detective Zimmerman at all that night.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Mason took seriously Patrick Ortiz’s announcement that he was a suspect in the arson at Pendergast’s office and in the murder of Shirley Parker. While the jailhouse bureaucrats processed Blues’s release on bail, he spent the rest of the morning waiting for the police department’s records clerk to make him a copy of the investigative reports on both crimes. He pushed her limited tolerance for defense lawyers when he asked for two sets of the reports as well as another set of the reports on the Cullan murder, knowing that Blues would want his own set.
Shortly after one o’clock, Blues emerged from the jail wearing the same clothes as the day he had been arrested. The suit he’d worn for his preliminary hearing was crammed into a grocery bag. Mason embraced him, Blues balking, more comfortable with a fist tap.
“Do I want to know how you pulled this off?” Blues asked.
“No. You hungry?”
“Is a bluebird blue? My tribal ancestors ate better on the reservation than I ate in that jail.”
“Let’s get out of here. I’m buying lunch.”
The snow already had covered the streets and sidewalks, obliterating where one began and the other stopped. The only clues were the cars stacked bumper-to-bumper on every street, many of them stuck on the sheet of ice that lay beneath the snow, tires spinning in a futile effort to get traction. Other drivers had made the mistake of trying to go around those cars, only to slide into someone else attempting the same maneuver. The result was automotive gridlock accompanied by blaring horns, screaming commuters, and ecstatic tow-truck drivers.
Blues pointed to a bar a block west of the courthouse. “Let’s try Rossi’s. He never closes.”
Rossi’s Bar & Grill lived off of the traffic from city hall, the county courthouse, and police headquarters. Judges, lawyers, and bureaucrats provided the lunc
h traffic. Cops owned the place after hours. DeWayne Rossi was a retired deputy sheriff who heard everything, repeated nothing, and spent his days and nights parked on a stool behind the cash register chewing cigars. Rossi tipped the scales at more than three hundred pounds, limiting his exercise to making change for a twenty. Regular patrons had a secret pool picking the date he would stroke out. Rossi liked the action enough to have placed his own bet.
Rossi’s had eight tables and was decorated in late-twentieth-century dark and dingy. A pair of canned spotlights washed the bar in weak light. Short lamps with green shades barely illuminated each table. A splash of daylight filtered in through dirty windows. A color TV hung from the ceiling above the bar and was permanently tuned to ESPN Classic. Rossi kept a .357 Magnum under the bar in case anyone tried to rob the place or change the channel.
There were two waitresses. Donna worked days and Savannah worked nights. They had both worked the street until they’d had too many johns and too many busts. The cops who used to arrest them now overtipped them to balance the books. A fry cook whose name no one knew hustled burgers and pork tenderloins from a tiny kitchen in the back.
“I haven’t been in here since I quit the force,” Blues said as he and Mason stamped the snow from their shoes.
“You didn’t miss the atmosphere?”
“I didn’t miss the company. I’m as welcome in a cops’ bar as a whore is in church.”
One table was occupied, as was one seat at the bar. Rossi turned away from the TV screen long enough to look at them, giving Blues an imperceptible nod that may just have been his jowls catching up with the rest of his head. Donna, a lanky, washed-out blonde with slack skin and a downturned mouth, was sitting at one of the tables reading USA Today and smoking a cigarette.
Mason and Blues chose a table against the wall that gave them a view out the windows. Donna materialized, setting glasses of water in front of them and laying her hand on Blues’s shoulder.
