the homeless woman's laughter. She looked better than he did. He wondered if she would offer to buy him dinner.
The waiter brought them three glasses of water. 'Turkey sandwich?' he asked Mason.
'Two coffees, black,' Harry said. 'What do you want Lou?'
'Nothing. I've had enough.'
'Why didn't you wait for me, like I told you?' Zimmerman asked.
Mason had an answer that was good enough for him, though he doubted it would satisfy Harry and Zimmerman.
'Cullan's files were the key to his murder. If I couldn't get my hands on them, I couldn't prove you guys were wrong about Blues. Ortiz hung up on me when I asked him to get a search warrant. The two of you were fighting crime. I was afraid someone would get to them before you were finished, so I went after them myself. Turned out I was right. Someone blew them up or stole them and made it look like they were blown up.'
'You better rethink that bullshit when the judge asks you to show remorse,' Zimmerman said.
'For what? Breaking and entering?'
'That's chump change,' Zimmerman said. 'I suppose you're going to tell us that Shirley Parker invited you down into that basement so you could pop her?'
Mason looked at Harry, not believing what he was hearing. 'Get real. You can't possibly think I shot Shirley Parker.'
'Who said she was shot?' Zimmerman asked him, enjoying the role reversal from Mason's cross- examination.
'Good for you, Carl. I had that coming. Maybe the killer just threw the bullet at her.'
Harry interrupted. 'Lou, this is serious. Officer Toland reported that he caught you inside that building earlier tonight but that Shirley Parker refused to press charges. He says that you threatened her. Carl tells you to sit tight, which for you is not possible. You and Shirley are the only ones inside that building when it blows up, and you are the only one who comes out alive. Only Shirley is shot to death, not blown up. How does all that look to you?'
'It looks like head-up-your-ass police work that is a lot easier than figuring out what really happened. Like figuring out who blew up the damn building, who knew about the tunnel to get the files out before they blew up the building, and who would kill Shirley Parker to make sure nobody found out what was in those files.'
'You'd been sitting on that building all day,' Zimmerman said. 'You could have found the tunnel, found the files, and been caught again by Shirley Parker. Only this time she wasn't going to let you off, so you killed her.'
'You left out that I also decided to blow my ass up along with the building to hide the evidence of my crime. Harry, if you guys are really looking at me for this, take me downtown, book me, and let's go see a judge. I'll crucify you in court and the media will pick at what's left.'
Harry said, 'You keep up this cowboy shit, and you won't leave us any choice. Same as Bluestone.'
'Okay, I'll be a good boy. But do your job. Check out the slug that killed Shirley Parker. Odds are that the same gun was used to kill Jack Cullan. That will clear Blues.'
'We don't need you to tell us how to do our job, Counselor,' Zimmerman said. 'If you killed Shirley Parker, I'll see to it that you share the needle with your client.'
'Carl, you know it's not safe to share needles. Leave the waiter a nice tip.'
Rachel was waiting for Mason when he got to his car. He was shivering under his blanket, envious of her warm parka.
'No,' he told her.
'No, what?'
'No, I'm not letting you take me home, patch me up, and put me to bed again unless you're in it, and that ain't likely.'
'You need to learn to value a woman's friendship for more than her vagina, Lou. It would broaden your horizons immeasurably. How about you take me home, I wait for you to patch yourself up, and then you tell me what happened? After which, you can go to bed by yourself.'
'Rachel, you need to learn to value a man's friendship for more than the stories you can squeeze out of him. It would broaden your horizons immeasurably.'
'I don't know. Men have so little else to offer.'
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Friday morning, standing naked in front of his bathroom mirror, Mason's body looked as if he'd been tattooed with a Rorschach test. He walked creakily around his house like the Tin Man in search of a lube job, trailed by Tuffy, whose whining and yelping Mason mistook for sympathy until he realized that the dog just wanted to be fed.
He tried rowing but gave up when he started to sink. He took a shower hot enough to parboil his skin, the heat loosening the kinks in his muscles and joints, and got back in bed long enough to read Rachel's article in the morning paper.
She had followed him home the night before, tending to his wounds long enough to extract information she agreed to attribute only to a source close to the investigation.
'I don't want you to think I'm a killer,' he told her.
'I don't; a lousy burglar, yes, but a killer, not so much.'
'Thanks for the endorsement.'
'So who did it? Who killed Cullan, blew up the barbershop, and killed Shirley Parker? And what happened to the files?'
'Like GI Joe says, knowing is half the battle. The other half is proving it. Ed Fiora is the leader in the clubhouse. He may have been happy that Cullan worked his magic on the license for the Dream Casino. But who wants a lawyer with a file that could send him to the federal penitentiary? Plus he's got the muscle. Tony Manzerio probably gets his rocks off blowing stuff up. Fiora killed Cullan-or had him killed-to preserve the attorney-client privilege. Then, he sent Tony to get the files from Shirley and killed her because she was the last of the loose ends.'
Rachel chewed on Mason's theory. 'Maybe, but killing Shirley is too messy. Threaten her, buy her off, and send her out of town. That would have made sense, but killing her turns up the heat hotter than the fire. Fiora isn't that stupid.'
'No plan ever goes down the way it's written. Something went wrong and Tony popped Shirley.'
'So Fiora has the files?'
'They ain't at the public library.'
'So how do you prove it?'
'Beats the hell out of me.'
Her story ran alongside a color photograph of him clutching the bars on the barbershop window while flames danced a pirouette around him. A spectator had taken the photograph and sold it to a wire service, turning a quick profit on tragedy. Mason held the picture up for a closer look as he searched for a trace of courage in his bugged- out eyes and gaping trout mouth.
Rachel wove the Pendergast angle into the story, giving it a gangland flavor that linked two twenty-first- century murders with a long-dead twentieth-century kingpin. She noted the rumored existence of Cullan's confidential files and the suspicion that they contained embarrassing information on the city's leaders, speculating that the files may have been destroyed in the fire or stolen. She described Shirley Parker as a never-married woman with no survivors whose only known employment had been for Jack Cullan, making her life more tragic than her death.
As for him, Rachel played it straight. The caption under the photograph identified him as Blues's lawyer. The article offered no explanation for his presence in the barbershop, noting that he had declined to comment on the record, as had Harry Ryman when she had asked him whether Mason was a suspect in Shirley Parker's murder.
