Lou Mason Mystery - 01 - Motion to Kill

by Joel Goldman

  He left the car in the drive and went for a walk through the pasture that surrounded the farmhouse. The pond he and Harlan had fished in was a quarter of a mile away, surrounded by cottonwoods. There was a break in the trees at one end of the pond and a small dock that hung over the water. Mason found Harlan’s fishing rod lying on the dock. It wasn’t baited, but he cast the line into the water anyway.

  At least three of the people connected to Harlan’s murder had been accounted for. Julio was dead, Jimmie Camaya was in the hospital, and Scott Daniels was somewhere over the rainbow. None of that meant that Harlan’s murder was solved. Whoever had given the order, whoever had set Vic Jr., Scott, and Harlan up in a money-laundering scam, whoever had ordered Mason’s death—was still in business.

  Camaya was the best bet to nail Harlan’s real killer. He’d use the identity of his boss to make a deal with the U.S. attorney, a fact that wouldn’t escape his boss and would, for the moment, make Camaya a bigger target than Mason, unless his nurses were good with a gun.

  But none of that explained Sullivan’s murder or Angela’s suicide. Angela’s confession to Sandra fit with his theory that the two murders were only indirectly related. Whoever killed Sullivan had set in motion everything else.

  Angela bugged the offices to get something on Sullivan. After his death, she hit pay dirt with the CDs and decided to set Mason up as the fall guy and watch what happened. Only she never got the chance to cash in. Suicide made no sense for her. She’d already taken all the big risks. She may have been scared when Sandra told her about the shoot-out at the lake, but Mason couldn’t believe Angela was frightened enough to kill herself.

  If she was murdered, her killer was more likely to have also murdered Richard Sullivan than Harlan Christenson. Death by lethal injection was not part of Camaya’s repertoire. In any case, he was digesting a .45-caliber slug when Angela died. Sullivan died by lethal injection. Mason caught himself humming “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” as he walked back to his car.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  A short time later, he stopped in front of Pamela Sullivan’s house. He was going back over ground he’d already covered, but he didn’t know what else to do. A For Sale sign had been recently planted in the front yard.

  Pamela greeted him dressed in a purple and yellow tennis warm-up suit. Judging from the boozy fragrance that hung over her, Mason doubted she would be hitting the courts anytime soon. Her face was puffy, her hair barely brushed. She wasn’t wearing makeup. Her eyes were slightly glassy. She was racing her demons to the bottom.

  “What can I do for you, Lou? Did you come back for something else?”

  “I just wanted to talk; that’s all.”

  “Well, come on in, then. I’m long on conversation.”

  She took him through the front hall, past Sullivan’s study, and into the kitchen. There was a bottle of wine on the kitchen table next to the morning paper. She fumbled in a cabinet for two glasses.

  “Nothing for me, Pamela. It’s a little early.”

  “Well, in my case, it’s a little late.” She poured herself a full glass. “My husband left one hell of a mess,” she said, pointing to the morning paper.

  The headline read Shoot-out Widens Law Firm Scandal. A picture of the shattered locker-room mirror with Camaya sprawled on the floor promised more gory details on the inside pages.

  Mason scanned the article, taking small comfort in the correct spelling of his name. There was a sidebar about Angela’s death. The coroner hedged his preliminary conclusion of suicide pending an autopsy.

  “I’ve been in the middle of the whole thing, Pamela, and I still don’t believe what’s happened. I hope it’s about over.”

  “So do I,” she said, the wine feeding her melancholy. “I’m heartbroken about Scott. Mostly for Gloria and their kids.”

  “He probably didn’t intend for it to go this far—it just got out of control. Actually, I think your husband was on to Scott and Harlan and was going to confront them.”

  “And probably demand his cut! Oh, don’t look at me that way, Lou,” she said as he picked up his jaw. “The man was a shit. I don’t think he would have cleaned house.”

  “Did he ever talk with you about what was going on?”

  “No. He made it clear early in our marriage that business was off-limits. I never made an issue of it.”

  “I don’t mean to pry, but there are some questions I need to ask you.”

  “You won’t offend me. I’m past that.”

  “Why didn’t you and Richard have children?”

  She sighed and looked over his shoulder, through the window, and back to another time.

  “We tried. I got pregnant twice and lost both babies with miscarriages. The doctors said I shouldn’t try again. Richard said it wasn’t my fault, but he never forgave me. That’s when he started cheating and I started pretending not to notice.”

  “Had Richard been married previously?”

  “No. What are you getting at?”

  “Richard fathered a child back in the late sixties by a woman named Meredith Phillips. I’ve seen the results of the paternity test.”

  The last of the color drained from her cheeks. Mason saw the ache for her own babies in her moist eyes.

  “I didn’t know,” she said softly.

  Mason believed her. If she’d been a client, he would have stopped and come back another day. But he didn’t know if there would be another day, so he pressed on.

  “You knew that Richard was HIV positive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you discuss that with him?”

  “He told me and said he’d take care of it, like it was a problem for a client.”

  “Weren’t you concerned about being exposed?”

  “We quit having sex years ago.” She hesitated and then added, “Richard didn’t want me, but I needed to be wanted. You don’t always find that where you think you will.”

  “Did Richard tell anybody else that he was HIV positive?”

  “I don’t know. We never spoke of it again.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “Diane dropped some papers off a few days after he told me. I must have looked like a wreck because she asked me if something was wrong and I just started bawling like a baby—about everything. I made her promise not to repeat anything.”

  “Was Richard treating himself for the virus, maybe injecting medications?”

  She nodded her head with a dry, humorless laugh. “He said he didn’t trust the doctors and that he’d found a source for a drug the FDA hadn’t approved but was supposed to be a miracle cure. I told him he could live a normal life for years and begged him not to try black-market drugs.”

  “But he did anyway?”

  “At least he thought so, but he was being taken. It was nothing but saline solution. The police found a vial of it when they searched the house.”

  “Do you know who he was getting it from?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Mason thanked her for her time and she walked him to the door. This time, as they passed Sullivan’s study, he noticed the computer on his desk.

  “By the way, did Richard do much work on his computer?”

  This time, her laugh held genuine amusement. “Are you kidding? He had to have that damn PC and every other new gadget that came out, but he never learned to use it. The man couldn’t type if his life depended on it.”

  The doorbell rang just as Mason turned the knob. It was Diane Farrell. A new Diane, she had makeup on, her hair was washed and styled, and she was wearing a lively blue-and-yellow floral-print dress.

  “Diane, darling! You look marvelous.” Pamela said. “Diane just turned thirty-something. We don’t keep an exact count. I gave her a day of beauty and a new dress. Doesn’t she look fantastic? Happy birthday, dear.”

  “And many more,” Mason added as he walked out.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Mason sat in his car in Pamela’s driveway, studying the names o
n the page he had ripped from the Rogersville, Kansas, phone book. There were ten ending in Phillips: Anson, C.J., Donald, Harry, Keenan, Martin, Missey, Opal, Vernon, and Wyatt. It was ten o’clock. He could make Rogersville by eleven.

  The addresses were a crisscross of numbered streets and dead presidents. Anson lived at 227 Jefferson and Wyatt at 1634 Roosevelt. The others were evenly distributed between Republicans and Democrats. Once he figured out where the party lines were, he figured he could find them easily enough.

  On his way, he called Blues. “I’m headed to Rogersville to find Meredith Phillips. I need you to track down Angela’s autopsy results.”

  “You think I’m running a bar and you’ve got a tab?”

  “We’ll settle up when this is over. I’ll call you if I find Meredith.”

  Most small towns are laid out with Main and First as the north-south and east-west dividers. If you can count and tell your right from your left, you can’t get lost. Rogersville was no different except that the presidents weren’t in chronological order. Fillmore and Hoover were back-to-back. Maybe the city fathers just had a wry sense of humor.

  Anson Phillips’s house was the third from the corner, west side of the street, on a block lined with heavy-limbed oaks leaning over the center of the street in a green canopy. Well-tended lawns, one-car garages, and sturdy wooden front stoops spoke to the longevity of the neighborhood.

  Mason parked in the driveway behind a late-model white Buick, a car the size of Brazil. His TR6 looked like a mutant exhaust pipe protruding from its tail end.

  Anson was as round a man as Mason had ever seen. He filled the width of the glider on his porch, work boots not quite touching the ground. His head perched like a paperweight on his shoulders, with no visible support from his neck. Eyes, nose, mouth, and ears melted into a pie-pan face. He was a denim-wrapped doughboy given too long to rise. Mason bet he hadn’t seen his feet in years.

  “Morning,” Mason called out from the driveway. “You Mr. Phillips?”

  “What you want, boy?”

  No one had called Mason a boy in years. He liked this guy already.

  “Help. I’m looking for a woman named Meredith Phillips. Last I knew, she lived in Rogersville. You’re the first Phillips in the book.”

  “What d’ya want with her?”

  “I’m a lawyer from Kansas City. She may have a child who’s inherited some money.”

  “Don’t know her. Might try Vernon Phillips. That family’s been around here a long time.”

  No one was home at Vernon’s, so Mason spent the next hour running down the rest of the Phillips clan. Only a few were home and none of them as helpful as Anson. He decided to try Vernon again.

  This time there was a car in the driveway, a lime green, road-worn Chevy with a Baby on Board sign hung in the rear window. It was littered with Happy Meal bags, two car seats, and a scattering of diapers and baby wipes.

  A chorus of bleating kids sang their demands from the other side of the screen door. A loose-jointed girl no more than twenty, her right hip jutting out to hold the rheumy-eyed infant glued to her side, answered Mason’s knocks.

  Stringy maize-colored hair hung over her narrow forehead as she examined him with defeated, washed-out eyes ringed by dark circles. She ran her tongue over chapped lips, while another toddler clung to her T-shirt, dragging it off one bony shoulder. The sour stench of soiled diapers followed them to the door.

  “I’m looking for Vernon Phillips. Is this his house?”

  “Yeah,” she said, pushing the older child behind her and tugging her shirt back over her exposed dull gray bra strap.

  “May I speak to him, please?”

  “He don’t live here no more. I’m renting from him.”

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  She disappeared for a minute and returned with a scrap of paper on which she’d written an address, 1860 Lincoln.

  “Do you know Mr. Phillips?”

  “Sure, known him all my life. We moved in across the street when I was five.”

  “Did he have children?”

  “A girl, Meredith.”

  “She’s the one I really need to talk to. Do you know where she lives?”

  “No place. She’s dead. Killed in a car wreck ‘fore my folks moved in.”

  From the back, Mason heard another wailing voice cry out. The toddler bolted while the baby spit up. She didn’t have to say good-bye.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Eighteen-sixty Lincoln was the address of the Loving Hands Convalescent Center, a low-slung, U-shaped building made of sandblasted brick. Heat waves radiated off a playground on the south side. Overgrown weeds had erupted through the asphalt, wrapping around the legs of a steel jungle gym. It was the only landscaping. A faded tire hung from a chain in the center of an otherwise empty swing set.

  Mason parked in the circle drive next to a barren flagpole. The plaque embedded at its base declared that the alumnae of Lincoln Elementary School had donated it in 1953. A pair of oversized, pale pink cupped hands had been painted over the entry beneath the gracious claim that those inside had cared for loved ones since 1985. He wondered if any of the alumnae had reenrolled at their alma mater, proving again that life is a circle.

  Airplane propeller–sized fans stood in the lobby blowing antiseptic flavored air down each stuffy hallway, though the breeze passed by the closed doors of the patients’ rooms.

  He shuddered, remembering when his aunt Claire dragged him to a nursing home to visit her mother. He was six. His grandmother was ancient. She lay in bed, near death, her hair fanned out around her head.

  Claire had patiently brushed her hair, working out the tangles. He had looked into her cloudy black eyes sunk deep into her face. Her skin had been brittle and translucent, like looking through tissue paper into her skull. Her parched lips had been shut, silencing the voice that used to sing him to sleep, her gnarled hands lying uselessly at her sides. She had smelled like the stuff that the cleaning lady used to clean the toilets. He never went back.

  Vernon Phillips lived in room twelve on the north wing. So did three other people, each cordoned off by a peach-colored vinyl curtain suspended from a track along the ceiling; four to a classroom, each bed with a view. Probably a lot less crowded than the days when kids roamed the halls.

  A clipboard with an erasable surface hung on each classroom door, listing the occupants and their bed numbers. Vernon was bed number three. Each patient’s space was furnished with a chair for visitors. Sandra Connelly sat in Vernon’s.

  “About time you got here, lover boy. I almost gave up on you,” she said as she stood.

  Sandra had an inexhaustible capacity for the unexpected. She had made it plain that she was doing her own investigation. Still, he was surprised to see her.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting. I had some other stops to make.”

  “Tell me all about it.”

  “Later. How’s Vernon?”

  “Like all vegetables. Not good company.”

  His chart hung from a hook at the end of the bed. The top page contained the admitting information. He’d been there five weeks following a stroke. Mason put the chart back and looked at the figure lying in bed.

  He was propped up, placing them in his line of sight. His gaze passed through them, through the walls, and kept going. Ragged gray stubble covered his chin and peppered his mottled cheeks. A loose-fitting hospital tunic lay over his chest and upper arms. His Adam’s apple bobbed rhythmically, the only sure sign part of him was still with the living.

  Mason couldn’t take his eyes off of him. Vernon knew the answers to Mason’s questions, but they were locked inside him. Mason sat at the foot of his bed, staring at him, weary at another dead end.

  “Let’s go,” Sandra said. “Maybe you’ll come up with another bright idea.” Mason didn’t move. “Come on, it’s not your fault. We’ll come back on Monday and check the city’s birth records.”

  “Good idea. But I think I’ll stay
a while. He might come around.”

  “Yeah, and the first thing he’ll say is ‘Lou, good to see you. Let me tell you about my daughter.’”

  Mason looked at Sandra, feeling the harshness in her, trying to figure out why she was risking her life to solve this case. He decided that she thrived on the combat. It was all about winning.

  “Stranger things have happened. I’ll call you.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  She waited for him to say something. He ignored her, content to watch the old man’s breathing. Sandra waited in silence for five minutes.

  “You damn well better call, Louis,” she said and left.

  Twice over the next hour, an aide came in to turn Vernon so that he wouldn’t develop bedsores. She was a copper-colored Hispanic woman, jet-black hair, broad, flat features, and strong hands. Vernon had had eight inches and a hundred pounds on her in his prime. Even now, he retained most of his bulk. Yet she rolled him effortlessly from side to side, massaging his flanks to encourage his circulation. She spoke no English. He hoped for Vernon’s sake that Medicare didn’t ask for her green card.

  At three o’clock, she returned with a syringe, rolled up Vernon’s sleeve, and gave him an injection. Smiling at Mason, she moved on to her next patient.

  Curious, he picked up Vernon’s chart and studied the doctor’s orders. Vernon was diabetic. He called Blues.

  “What’d you find out about Angela’s death?”

  “Insulin overdose, just like Sullivan. Cops canceled the suicide.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  Now he knew how Sullivan and Angela had been murdered. Vernon could tell him who and why, but he wasn’t talking.

  Mason stood at the edge of his bed, staring at him, feeling like an idiot. What did he expect Vernon to do? Listen to a list of suspects and blink once for innocent, twice for guilty?

  The Loving Hands people provided a nightstand for each patient’s personal items. A copy of a Kansas City Star newspaper lay on Vernon’s. Mason picked up the newspaper to check for the date. It was two days old. Vernon had had a recent visitor.