small, but settled into his own practice five years ago. He liked the freedom to pick and choose his cases, knowing that he could hold a partners’ meeting in a phone booth or bathroom.
Technology allowed him to get by without a secretary. His Aunt Claire, who had raised him from the age of three, had insisted that he take typing in the eighth grade, the single most useful course he ever took. That was before computers replaced slide rules as the indispensable educational tool.
Mickey Shanahan had been the only person on Mason’s payroll, working as his legal assistant. Mickey had hated the job title, preferring wingman because it had more Gen-X appeal. The position was currently open since Mickey had joined the staff of Josh Seeley when Seeley was elected the previous November as Missouri’s newest United States senator. Mickey hungered for a career in politics like a junkie with a jones on.
Abby Lieberman, Seeley’s chief of staff, had hired Mickey. Mason carried his own pained longing for Abby. They had been in love, still were as far as Mason was concerned. Abby didn’t deny it. She just said love wasn’t enough to overcome Mason’s penchant for violent cases.
She could accept that he defended people charged with heinous crimes, but she couldn’t live with the violence that poured out of his cases and into his life and hers. More than that, she couldn’t understand why he so willingly dove into the dark water floating around his cases. He couldn’t explain something to her that he scarcely understood himself.
He hadn’t seen Abby since they had dinner just after the election in November, four months ago. She’d told him she was moving to D.C. Driving home, he had turned on the radio, catching Tina Turner asking, What’s love got to do with it? The lyric stuck with him, surfacing whenever he thought of Abby. He shoved the song out of his head one more time and refocused on the stacks of paper littering his desk.
One of the things Mason liked most about his law practice was its sheer unexpectedness. The uncertainty of where the next case would come from, the unpredictability of the story the client would tell him, the jaw-dropping impact when most of it turned out to be true. None of which prepared him for the knock at his door.
“It’s open,” Mason called out, looking up from his desk.
Vanessa Carter opened the door, standing in the frame, waiting a moment to be certain that Mason recognized her. She was black, handsome though not beautiful, with a close-cropped Afro flecked with traces of silver. She was neither slim nor thick, but solidly midlife, dressed in a conservative navy suit, a long winter coat slung over one arm.
The last time Mason had seen her was in her chambers. She had been Judge Vanessa Carter then, a conservative judge on everybody’s short list for promotion from the state trial court to the federal bench, and she had been presiding over the murder case of Wilson “Blues” Bluestone, Jr.
Blues was Mason’s closest friend, landlord, and tour guide to the world of violent dispute resolution. At the time, he was being held without bail for a murder he hadn’t committed. Mason had asked for a gangland favor to pressure Judge Carter into letting Blues out on bail so he could help Mason find the real killer.
The favor was given and Mason cleared Blues’s name. Judge Carter quit the bench the day she released Blues, rumors trailing her like poisonous vapors. The last thing she told Mason still haunted him. She would have granted bail anyway.
In the years since then, she had quietly rebuilt her career as a private judge specializing in mediation and arbitration, a low-cost alternative to expensive civil litigation. The practice provided a second career for retired judges, and Judge Carter had gradually won a significant following with her balanced handling of cases.
Mason had taken comfort in her success, his guilt assuaged but not forgotten. He handled a few civil cases from time to time, and when the parties elected alternative dispute resolution, he’d always managed to convince the opposing lawyer to select someone besides Judge Carter. While Kansas City may seem like a small town to those who didn’t know it, it was more than large enough for Mason not to have crossed Judge Carter’s path since that last hearing in her chambers.
He looked at her now and didn’t know what to say. She filled the void.
“We have a problem,” she said.
NINE
“I’m being blackmailed,” Vanessa Carter told him.
She threw her coat onto Mason’s sofa, draping it over a stack of files Mason was storing against the cushions. She angled one of the low-slung round-backed chairs in front of his desk, sitting down with enough authority that Mason nearly rose and said, Good morning, Your Honor.
His clients always began by telling him they had a problem. His problem was helping them with their problem, but that didn’t make them the same problem. Their problems came down to freedom or prison, sometimes life or death. His problems were always legal, strategic, and pragmatic. Keep the client free or, at least, off death row. And get paid.
Vanessa Carter announced that she and Mason had a problem like it was a shared burden. Her simple declaration demanded his next question, one that hovered over his heart, taunting the long scar that dressed his chest. He suspected the answer, even knew what it had to be, but had to hear her say it.
“By whom?” he asked. His pulse quickened as he struggled to remain neutral.
“Somebody at Galaxy Gaming.”
She said it like she was pronouncing sentence on Mason, her words hitting him like a term of twenty-five years to life. There was no statute of limitations on some debts and Mason’s had just been called.
Galaxy Gaming had purchased the Dream Casino three years ago. It was a riverboat cash cow docked on the Missouri River at the spot where Kansas City had been born more than a hundred and fifty years earlier.
Galaxy had purchased the Dream from the estate of Ed Fiori, the grantor of the gangland favor Mason had used to force Judge Carter to free Blues. Mason had always suspected that Fiori had secretly recorded his request for Fiori’s help. Whether it was audio or video Mason didn’t know, but he knew it didn’t matter.
After Fiori’s death, Mason had worried that the casino’s new owners would stumble across the tape, hoarding it until they needed a return favor, explaining to Mason the laws of inheritance that governed secret sins. When no bent-nose pit boss with a Jersey accent knocked at his door over the next couple of years, Mason’s fears had begun to recede.
Sometimes, he indulged in the fantasy that he’d gotten away with it, just as many criminals got away with their crimes. Other times, he reminded himself that he had had no choice, would do it again if he had to, and would deal with the consequences when the time came, increasingly hopeful that it never would.
But it had and the fact that the messenger was Vanessa Carter bound the moment in the irony that so often shrouded trouble and justice. The ripple in his pulse spent itself as he forced his hands to loosen their grips on the arms of his chair. He was a lawyer and lawyers made their living untying shrunken knots. Get at it, he told himself, nodding at Judge Carter, unable to think of her without the honorific.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“I was hired as an arbitrator in a sexual harassment case. The plaintiff is a woman named Carol Hill. She worked as a blackjack dealer at the Galaxy Casino and claimed that one of the supervisors harassed her. The hearing was last week. I took the case under advisement and told them I would have a ruling in thirty days. Yesterday a man called me. He didn’t give me his name and I think he used something electronic to disguise his voice. He said that if I didn’t rule in Galaxy’s favor, I was finished.”
“How could he make that happen?”
She glared at Mason like he was a simpleton. He returned her stare, forcing her to lay it out. She drew a breath and squared her shoulders.
“He said he had a tape recording of me agreeing to do a favor for Ed Fiori when I was still on the bench. I told him he was a liar. He played the tape for me over the phone.”
Mason caught the first cracks in her judicial demeanor as her voice quivered and her eyes blinked. She swallowed hard, a momentary spasm tightening the muscles in her neck. He gave her a minute to regroup.
“He wasn’t lying,” Mason said.
“No, he wasn’t lying,” she said, her voice solid again, her eyes steady and clear. “On the tape, Fiori tells me to release Wilson Bluestone on bail or my son’s gambling debts would be collected the hard way. I asked Fiori why
