Lou Mason Mystery - 02 - The Last Witness (35 page)

“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 distance. 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.”

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.

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 where 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.”

“What did Cullan say?”

Amy pawed the snow at her sides as her face slackened into a dull, exhausted gaze. “He laughed at me and told me to give him the file. I took the gun out and he kept laughing, so I shot him. Then I turned off the heat, opened the windows, and went home.”

Mason studied her, searched her suddenly detached face for a hint of meaning. She leaned against her father’s headstone, reaching idly toward her mother’s to dust the snow from the channels of her mother’s engraved name.

“What did you do with the gun?”

Amy stood, brushed the snow from her jeans, and gave Mason a sly look. “I threw it into the Missouri River on New Year’s Eve. By the way, you’re quite the swimmer.”

Mason flashed back to New Year’s Eve. He remembered seeing Amy in the mayor’s entourage just before Beth found him at the back of the Dream Casino. In the video Ed Fiora had shown him, Beth had left him on the prow of the boat. The next thing he’d seen was the flash from a gun. Though the shooter’s face was obscured, he and Fiora had assumed that the shooter had been Beth.

“If it makes you feel any better, you didn’t miss.”

“Actually, that makes me feel worse. I didn’t know what to do about you. I just knew I couldn’t let you find out about me. I saw you and Beth Harrell go outside and I took a chance. You should have bled to death and drowned.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“That’s all right,” she answered as she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a gun. “I get a second chance.”

“Your father’s other gun. The one you used to kill Shirley Parker. Harry Ryman matched the ballistics reports. I told Carl Zimmerman where Cullan’s files were, and he told you. You knew about the tunnel to Pendergast’s office from when you worked at the mayor’s campaign headquarters on the other side of the alley behind the barbershop.”

“Jack even gave me the tour.”

“You ran into Shirley in the tunnel and killed her.”

“Kind of makes it your fault, don’t you think?”

“Except I didn’t pull the trigger. You did.”

“Shirley was hysterical. She came at me with a pair of scissors.”

Mason shook his head. “Self-defense would have worked when you were fifteen. That story won’t sell. There were no scissors where you left Shirley’s body. You got your file and part of the mayor’s, but you left enough behind to convict him. Why?”

“I just took the parts about me.”

“Carl Zimmerman and James Toland were late to the party. They stole the files they wanted and booby-trapped the rest. Did you know about that?”

“No, but I would have helped them if I had known.”

“Blaming all this on dear old Dad won’t work anymore, Amy. Killing me won’t save you. Your car is stuck in the snow. You’ll have to leave my body on your parents’ graves. That’s a pretty big clue. And your sister is an eyewitness. Are you going to kill her too?”

“Amy, I wanna go home,” Cheryl said. “I’m cold.”

Cheryl had given up making snow angels and was standing only a few feet from Amy. She spoke with a thick-tongued child’s singsong whine. Though she was nearly thirty, her mind was trapped in those last moments when she’d been an innocent child, before her father had beaten her future out of her. Her labored speech was a lasting reminder.