by Joel Goldman
Mason tried returning some of the calls from lawyers on other cases he was handling but gave up when he realized they were using those cases as an excuse to talk about the shoot-out at the lagoon. Instead, he called Rachel and asked her to check the Star‘s clipping file for stories about the death of Donald Ray White.
“Who was Donald Ray White and why are you interested in that story?”
“Because.”
“Because it has something to do with the mayhem epidemic you started, or just because?”
“Donald Ray White was the director of liquor control until he was killed eighteen years ago.”
“If I ask you who killed him, will you tell me?”
“According to Howard Trimble, who inherited Donald Ray’s job, he was killed by his brain-damaged daughter, Cheryl White.”
“Why aren’t you convinced? Do you have another suspect in mind?”
“Yeah. Amy White.”
“Mayor Billy Sunshine’s Amy White? Get out of town! Give it to me!”
“Do your homework first. I’m at the office.”
Mason sorted through his mail, the volume of which had doubled. Much of it was from cranks and kooks who wanted to hire him. One writer even asked Mason to sue the planet Zircon for bombarding him with radiation.
His phone rang so often, he let his answering machine screen calls. When Beth Harrell called, he nearly succumbed to the sound of her voice and picked up the phone. She sounded distant, almost as if she were adrift.
“Lou,” she said, “it’s Beth. I know things are crazy for you right now. They sure are crazy for me. Call me when you can. There’s something I have to tell you.”
Mason ran down a mental list of what that could possibly be and didn’t come up with anything he was anxious to find out. The sun was making its late afternoon exit, carpeting Broadway with shadows, when Mason’s cell phone rang.
“Do you make house calls?” Blues asked.
“Depends on the patient’s condition. Is it critical?”
“Could be. I followed Amy from city hall. She stopped at the Goodwill Industries sheltered workshop and picked up a woman who must be her sister. They went out to lunch, did some shopping, and came home.”
“Sounds very suspicious.”
“Wait till you hear about the snowman. The two of them came back outside and built a snowman and had a snowball fight. Then they got back in the car and went sledding on Suicide Hill on Brookside Boulevard, which isn’t far from her house. Amy acted like she didn’t have a care in the world. Her sister was a little slow. Amy had to help her with her mittens and show her how to steer the sled, things like that. They just got home.”
“Give me the address,” Mason said, jotting it down. “Keep an eye on them. I’m waiting to hear from Harry on something. As soon as he calls, I’ll be there.”
Mason stacked and unstacked the papers on his desk, rearranged the pencils in his drawer, and shot baskets with Mickey using wadded-up crank letters as basketballs and his trash can as a hoop. Mickey let him win the first two games before suggesting they play for money. Mason knew he was being set up but didn’t mind. Mickey ran his scams with good humor, even making Mason feel charitable as the money changed hands.
Rachel rocketed into Mason’s office at four o’clock with a set of clippings under her arm and high color in her cheeks. Mickey was bent over backward, making the winning basket in a game of H-O-R-S-E.
“Who’s the contortionist?” Rachel asked.
Mickey looked up, sprang forward on one hand, and extended the other. “Mickey Shanahan.”
“Beat it, Mickey,” Rachel told him in a sharp tone that left no room for argument. “And close the door behind you.”
Mickey looked at Mason, who nodded and pointed at the door. “She’s usually a lot meaner. She’s having a good day.”
After Mickey closed the door, Rachel and Mason had a staring contest. Mason caught a merry glint in her eye and a fragment of a smile that turned the corner of her mouth slightly upward.
“First one to smile is a weenie,” Mason said.
“Stand up and get over here.”
Mason did as he was told, stopping well inside her territorial imperative while he tried to decipher the mixed message that was scrambling his hormonal network. Before he was able to crack Rachel’s code, she grasped the back of his neck with both of her hands, pulled his mouth to hers, and crushed him with a kiss that nearly sucked the life out of him. Mason couldn’t decide whether to hold on or beg for mercy. He settled for the Issac Newton kissing principle of equal and opposite reaction.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
“Damn it!” she said when she released him and came up for air. “Nothing!”
“What’s the matter?” he gasped.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “You’re just not a woman. What a waste!”
“Could I have a translation here or at least a reverse-angle replay?”
Rachel stroked the side of his face with excruciating tenderness. “I’m sorry, Lou. I told you not to get a crush on me because I’d break your heart. I should have listened to my own advice. You’re cute, funny, and you give great tips. Today’s was a megatip. I guess it all overwhelmed me, and I had to find out if it was you or the tips that were making me wet.”
“Shouldn’t we at least have sex just to be certain?”
“Further proof that you’ll never be a woman. You’ll have to settle for the clippings on Donald Ray White. Why didn’t you tell me that Jack Cullan was the family’s lawyer?”
Rachel handed Mason the clippings and sat down on his couch as he leafed through them. “And take all the fun out of your job?”
She joined him on the couch. “Okay, give me the rest of it.” Mason started to protest, and Rachel interrupted him. “I know. It’s all off the record until you tell me otherwise.”
“Jack Cullan and Blues had an argument in the bar the Friday night that Cullan was killed.”
“I know. That was the key to the prosecutor’s case,” Rachel said.
“Cullan threatened to shut Blues down. Later than night, he called Amy White and demanded that she bring him Blues’s liquor control file.”
“That night?”
“Cullan lived for immediate gratification. Amy told me about the call from Cullan but said that she told him that he’d have to wait until Monday morning, but Howard Trimble told me that Amy called him that night and he met her at his office and gave her Blues’s file.”
Rachel whistled. “So you think Amy took the file to Cullan and killed him for making her come out late at night?”
Mason shook his head. “Not exactly. According to Howard Trimble, Donald Ray was a child abuser. He’d been arrested for abusing Amy’s sister, Cheryl. Amy was fifteen and Cheryl was twelve. Cullan got him off and kept it quiet and, in the process, added Donald Ray to his stable of indebted city officials. After Donald Ray got out of jail, he took his frustrations out on Cheryl, leaving her brain damaged. Then Cheryl shot her father with his own gun. Cullan made that case go away too.”
“How does a brain-damaged twelve-year-old kill her father?”
“I don’t think Cheryl shot her father. I think Amy did, and Cullan pinned it on Cheryl because nothing would happen to her. He made a long-term investment in Amy and was collecting—again—when he told her to get Blues’s file.”
“Maybe Amy decided her account was already paid in full.”
“More likely that she decided to cancel the debt.”
“The newspaper reported it as an accidental shooting, a tragic accident. The story says that Donald Ray had just cleaned the gun and set it down for a moment. The wife said Cheryl thought it was a toy and was playing with it when the gun went off accidentally. Everybody said how sad, and that was it. What now?”
“Harry Ryman is doing a ballistics check to see if Donald Ray and Cullan were killed with the same gun.”
“Where’s Amy?”
“Blues is babysitting her—from a dist
ance. As soon as I hear from Harry, I’m going to go see her.”
“Why not just send the cops to pick her up?”
“They already arrested the wrong person once. I’d like to be sure this time.”
“You’re better than I thought for someone with the wrong chromosomes. Keep me posted,” she added before kissing him lightly on the cheek in the best tradition of sisters everywhere.
Harry called shortly after six o’clock. “You were right. But there’s more there than even you thought.”
Mason listened as Harry outlined what he had found. “How do you want to play this?” Harry asked him.
“Carefully. She’s the last witness.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
Fifteen minutes later, Mason turned onto Amy’s street. It was a neighborhood where garages were used for storage or spare bedrooms and people parked on the street. Every car had been plowed in, sandwiched between a three-foot snow wall and the curb. Some people had dug out, and others had given up and gone back to bed until spring.
Amy’s house was the third one in from the corner. It was dark. There was no car parked in the driveway or on the street in front of the house. Nor was Blues anywhere in sight. He wasn’t parked on the street or around the corner, and he wasn’t hiding behind a shrub next to Amy’s front porch.
Mason opened his cell phone and realized it was off. He turned it on and saw the digital readout informing him that he’d missed a call. He punched in the code for his voice mail. The message was from Blues. Amy was running.
Mason banged his fists on the steering wheel, nearly sending the Jeep into a figure-eight spin before he pulled it back to the center of Amy’s street. He drove out of her neighborhood, parked in front of a Circle K convenience store, and called Blues.
“Where the hell have you been?” Blues demanded.
“Don’t turn codependent on me! What happened?”
“I lost her.”
“I hope the story is better than the ending.”
“About an hour ago, Amy started turning out the lights in her house. A little while later, she started loading suitcases into the trunk of her car. She drives a black Honda, probably a couple of years old.”
“What? You were hiding in the garage?”
“No, boy genius. I was hiding in my car at the back of a driveway across the street. Amy’s house has a detached garage. I had a clear shot.”
“You don’t think she noticed you sitting in her neighbor’s driveway?”
“It’s like this. The driveway had been plowed down to the concrete. That meant the people who lived there used a service. Newspapers from the last three days were lying on the driveway. That meant those people were out of town. The driveway curves around to a side-entrance garage that is blocked off by tall evergreens. That meant I could see Amy but she couldn’t see me. I waited until it got dark and drove up with my lights off. She never saw me.”
“You are too good for words and you are my hero. So how did you lose her?”
“I was following her from a distance, about half a block, with a few cars in between us. I was in an intersection when one of the cars in front of me stopped suddenly and we had a chain-reaction collision. My new truck got sandwiched, and then I got T-boned by a car coming through the intersection.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m all right but we’re fucked. Amy’s in the wind, man.”
Mason had brought Rachel’s newspaper clippings with him. He fanned out the articles on the passenger seat, looking for the one he’d scanned a few hours ago without paying any real attention to it.
“Maybe not. I’ll call you later.”
The Jeep’s heater couldn’t keep up with the cold, and Mason’s breath crystallized and evaporated in quick gray puffs as he studied the article. It was a human-interest piece on Memorial Day observances that featured a picture of Amy and Cheryl visiting their parents’ graves at Forest Park Cemetery. The accompanying story recounted that Cheryl had suffered brain damage in a fall at home, that their father had been killed in an accidental shooting, and that their mother had passed away a short time later.
Amy was quoted as saying that they always visited their parents’ graves on Memorial Day. She had added that they also visited before going away for a long trip, in keeping with a tradition started by Cheryl’s guardian, Jack Cullan.
Mason couldn’t imagine Cullan as a guardian of anything except a junkyard where he dumped people after he had used them up like rusted-out, stripped-down cars sitting up on blocks, their guts scattered to the four corners. He also couldn’t picture Cullan taking the time to honor the dead, with the obvious exception of Tom Pendergast. Mason hoped that Amy had kept alive Cullan’s curious tradition of visiting the dead before hitting the road.
The black wrought-iron gate that barred access to Forest Park Cemetery after dark hung open, tapping against a stone wall with each gust of wind when Mason pulled up to the entrance. His headlights shot bright streamers into the cemetery, which spread out like buckshot before disappearing in the distance. Mason blocked the entrance with his jeep and got out.
The padlock for the gate hung from a chain, smashed and broken, the scratches fresh. There were also fresh scrapes on the rails of the gate, as if the assailant hadn’t been able to stop after simply breaking the lock. A woman’s white cotton glove lay in the snow at the foot of the gate, stained with fresh blood. He got the message. Whoever had opened the gate was out of control, and anyone that got in the way was going to take a beating.
The main road through the cemetery had been scraped, leaving a bottom layer of packed snow and ice harder than the underlying asphalt. Mason stayed on foot, following tire tracks illuminated by the moon. Snow had drifted against many of the tombstones, all but burying them. Some heirs and mourners had erected taller monuments to the deceased, capped by crosses that broke through the snow toward heaven.
Mason’s footsteps slapped against the packed snow, a hollow sound in a silent theater, his shadow a poor accompaniment to a night owl passing overhead, its moonlit silhouette leading Mason deeper into the cemetery. A rasping, grating, fractious noise drew Mason off the main road along a winding path among the dead, until he crested a small rise and looked down on a pair of graves.
Amy White was bent over one of the headstones, her back to Mason, flailing at it with a hammer, cursing the rock, the ground, and the bones beneath. Her car was stuck nose down in the snow on an embankment opposite where Mason stood, its engine running, headlights glowing beneath the snow. A woman he assumed was Cheryl lay nearby on her back, making angel wings in the snow with her arms.
“Amy,” Mason called to her.
She wheeled around, her face twisted with exhumed rage, her movement revealing Donald Ray White’s name engraved on the stone. Her cold skin was paler than the moon, colored only by flecks of blood at the corners of her mouth.
Amy raised the hammer above her head as if to throw it at Mason, then spun back to her mad work, striking another blow against her dead father. The head of the hammer flew off, knifing into the snow as the handle shattered, spearing her hand with a jagged splinter. She clamped the splinter with her teeth, yanked it from her fleshy palm, and spat it out.
“I knew it would be you!” she screamed.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
Mason walked down the hill toward Amy, keeping his hands in plain view in an effort to calm her down.
“How could you know it would be me?”
Amy gulped air and wiped her bloody hand against her jeans. “That day in the parking garage, when I asked for your help—I knew you wouldn’t do it. I knew you thought I was just Billy Sunshine’s toady. That I just wanted to protect his precious goddamn career.”
“You’re right. That is what I thought. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? You wanted me to find your file, not the mayor’s.”
Amy heaved, gradually catching her breath, forcing her madness back into a genie’s bottle.
“If you had told me w
here the mayor’s file was, I would have found mine. Then everything would have been fine, except I knew you wouldn’t do it. I knew you wouldn’t let it rest until you found out.”
“Until I found out that you killed your father, not Cheryl; that you used the same gun to kill Jack Cullan.”
Amy threw her head back. “How did you know about the gun?”
“You told me that Cullan had wanted Blues’s liquor license brought to him on the Friday night he and Blues argued at the bar but that you put him off until Monday. Howard Trimble told me that he gave you the file that same night. Yet you didn’t give the file to Cullan, and I couldn’t figure out why. Then Trimble told me what your father had done to Cheryl, how your mother had hired Cullan to defend your father and then to defend your sister.”
“My father was a hell-born bastard that deserved to die!”
“That’s probably what a jury would have said. Especially since the police reports showed that you shot him in self- defense. The cops found a gun in your father’s hand. Your mother said that he’d fired a shot and threatened to kill all of you. Her mistake was calling Jack Cullan before she called the police.”
Amy slumped to the ground, her back against her father’s tombstone. “I don’t remember very much after I shot him. My mother and I were screaming. We didn’t know what to do.”
“Cullan must have convinced your mother that the only way to save you was to blame Cheryl since she would never be prosecuted. Cullan had the juice to make everyone look the other way. Your mother even got to keep the guns. Instead of a fee, Cullan got you, just like a future draft choice.”
“Jack Cullan was as rotten as my father. When he called me that night, I did what he told me, but I couldn’t stand it anymore. I couldn’t stand that he was going to ruin someone else. I had found the gun in my mother’s things when she died. I took it with me to Jack’s house. I was going to make him stop.”
