Final Judgment (6 page)

One thing was clear to Mason. There was nothing in the case that would cause Galaxy Gaming to risk blackmailing Judge Carter. If Carol Hill won, Galaxy would pay her off, probably fire Charles Rockley, and move on. Galaxy’s HR manager would conduct sensitivity training for the casino’s employees. It was a cost of doing business. If Galaxy was blackmailing the judge, there had to be a reason unrelated to the lawsuit.

If Charles Rockley was willing to rape Carol Hill, he was probably willing to blackmail Judge Carter to keep his job. He was the obvious—and, for the moment, only—suspect.

Mason went back to the computer, pulling up Rockley’s personnel file, printing the page with his home address and phone number. While he couldn’t sue Rockley to make him back off Judge Carter, he was confident that Rockley would respond to Blues’s powers of persuasion. Maybe, Mason thought, this would all work out after all.

There was only one thing that nagged at him. Rockley was such an obvious suspect. Just like Avery Fish, and Mason was certain that Fish was innocent.

ELEVEN

It was after dark by the time Mason finished reviewing Carol Hill’s file. He stood in the bay window looking down at the traffic on Broadway. Headlights bounced off cars and curbs. A few people scurried along the sidewalk, ducking into doorways beneath neon lights, finding a bar to warm up in before heading home. The late winter chill gave them and the rest of the city a hunkered-down feel, everyone holding on against the cold, hoping that spring was just around the corner.

Mason hunched his shoulders, feeling the cold passing through the glass and into his bones, the wind tunneling past his window. Some of those people would camp out on bar stools and in booths in the bar one floor below where he stood. Blues on Broadway was a place where people came to order a draw and kick back to live jazz, the regulars hoping Blues was in the mood to play the piano.

Most of those people spent their lives walking a straight line that led from the delivery room to the mortuary with predictable, orderly stops along the way for school, jobs, marriage, kids, dreams, disappointments, and death. A handful, like Blues, made a conscious decision to stay off the track.

He was a full-blooded Shawnee Indian, taller than Mason, with jet-black hair, dark eyes, and copper skin that made no secret of his ancestry. He was all coiled muscle and sinew, never forgetting the survival skills he’d learned in the Army’s Special Forces. After the Army taught him to be a killer, the Kansas City Police Department taught him to catch killers. He quit when he couldn’t make his hard-nosed code fit with a bureaucratic approach to justice.

Since then, Blues had invoked his code as a shield or sword for those who needed it or deserved it. Mason had needed it more than once.

Along the way, Blues had learned to play jazz piano jamming in joints like the one he now owned. When he played, it was for himself. Anyone who could afford the price of a cold beer could watch and listen. That was fine with him. He paid no attention when people whispered their amazement that sounds so sweet could come from the hands of a man whose looks could kill.

Mason went downstairs and sat in a booth at the back of the bar waiting for Blues to finish playing a number that Mason didn’t recognize. Three people listened from stools along the mahogany bar that dominated the room. Hank, a beanpole bartender, kept their drinks fresh. The customers clapped when Blues stood. He acted like he hadn’t heard, joining Mason in the booth.

“Something new?” Mason asked.

“Yeah,” Blues said. “I’ve been fooling around with my own stuff. Thought I’d try it out.”

Mason shook his head. “I’ll never understand how you can compose music. Do you hear the sounds in your head before you play the notes?”

“I feel them more than I hear them.”

“Well, that makes it so much easier to understand.”

“I saw Vanessa Carter going up the back stairs earlier today. What’s she want with you?”

“It’s what she wants with us.”

He summarized his conversation with Judge Carter and covered the highlights in Carol Hill’s file, keeping his voice low even though Hank and the three customers were too wrapped up in an argument over which college team had the best point guard to pay any attention to them. Blues listened, completely still, his face a mask.

“You think it’s this guy Rockley?” he asked when Mason finished.

“Makes sense. He’s the guy with the most to lose. Galaxy can’t be happy about the case, but there’s nothing there to make them take a chance like this.”

“So if Rockley’s just a supervisor, how does he know about the tape of the conversation between Fiori and the Judge? And how does he get ahold of it so he can play it over the phone for her? That’s not the kind of thing Galaxy is gonna leave lying around in the employee lunchroom.”

Mason chewed his lip, annoyed that he hadn’t considered Blues’s questions. “I don’t know, but it makes sense to start with him. We can’t just call up Al Webb and ask him which one of his employees is a blackmailer.”

“Who is Al Webb?”

“General manager of the Galaxy. I read his testimony from the arbitration. He made Rockley sound like the employee of the year.”

“How long has Rockley worked for Galaxy?”

“About a year,” Mason answered. “Same as Webb.”

“So Rockley wasn’t around when Galaxy took over the boat, which means that he couldn’t have stumbled across the tape when he was cleaning out Fiori’s office. If Rockley made the call to the judge, somebody else had to have told Rockley about the tape.”

“It’s not just the tape of the call between Fiori and Judge Carter. That tape implicates me, but it doesn’t convict me. It’s the tape of the conversation between me and Fiori that we’ve got to find, if it exists.”

“And the people who know about it.”

“That too.”

“There aren’t any small problems, are there?” Blues asked.

“Nope. Just big opportunities,” Mason said.

“Still gets back to Rockley for now.”

“He’s the guy with the most to lose in the arbitration. Galaxy loses, they pay off and move on. Rockley will probably be out of a job.”

“So we go pay Rockley a visit and help him redirect his life.”

Mason shook his head. “It’s better if you go by yourself. Keeps me one step removed from Rockley.”

Blues leaned back in the booth, his hands on the table, long fingers spread wide. “You can’t dodge this thing forever. You did what you did. You’re going to have to deal with that.”

Mason drew a deep breath, letting it out. “I know. It’s just a little tricky to figure it all out at once. I can’t just step up to the plate, turn myself in to the cops and the state bar disciplinary office, without leaving Judge Carter hanging out again. She deserves better from me.”

“That’s a pretty sharp sword to fall on, anyway.”

“I’ll do it if I have to. A blackmailer is never satisfied. Maybe the only way to finish it is to go public. Take away the threat of being exposed. Besides, like you said, I did what I did.”

“Don’t order your sackcloth and ashes yet,” Blues said. “There’s other ways to take care of this.”

TWELVE

Mason rowed eight thousand meters Thursday morning while it was still dark. He kept his rowing machine in the dining room, taking advantage of the double windows to watch the hardy souls who jogged down his block. Yellow light from streetlamps caught the reflecting tape stuck to their running clothes as they passed, leaving puffs of frozen breath visible in their wake.

His exercise routine alternated between running and rowing, not only because of the cross-training benefits, but to avoid boredom. He had played rugby until a few years ago when it became too hard to get out of bed the morning after a vicious scrum. Conceding that he was forty-three, he gave up the game, staying in shape with his current routine.

His house was in a tony neighborhood nine blocks south of the Country Club Plaza, Kansas City’s answer to New York’s Fifth Avenue, and two blocks south of Loose Park, a micro-scale alternative to Central Park. Kansas City didn’t claim to be the Big Apple of the Midwest, but it had long ago shed its cow-town image.

He lived in an area that was home to the upwardly mobile who were certain they’d arrived. Many of the people who lived there were fighting the same battle against time that he was, convinced that if they ran another mile they would live another day. Mason figured eight thousand meters was at least as good an investment.

His Aunt Claire had given the house to him and his ex-wife, Kate, as a wedding present. He’d grown up there with Claire, but the house had worked better for him and his aunt than it did for him and his wife. When Kate moved out, Mason refurnished the dining room with the rowing machine. Abby banished it to the basement, Mason hauling it back up when she left town, his love life defined by its location.

His dog Tuffy, a German shepherd–collie mixed-breed anti-watchdog, did three laps around the rowing machine before settling in front of the flywheel, enjoying the breeze from Mason’s labors.

The sky was rounding out to a gunmetal gray by the time he got out of the shower, dressed, and started scavenging for something that would pass for breakfast in his kitchen. He spread the
Kansas City Star
on the kitchen table while he chewed a nutrition bar that promised him more than it could possibly deliver.

There was a teaser above the masthead about an article in the Style section on how to make tomorrow, Valentine’s Day, special. Mason had bought a card for Abby, signed it, stuck it in an envelope, and then thrown it away. He didn’t want to be like the nutrition bar and promise Abby something he couldn’t deliver.

An hour later he was in his office, behind his desk, staring at the dry erase board. He used circles, broken and solid lines, boxes, triangles and any other geometry he could think of to link the people and facts of a case, making room for what he knew or suspected and taking stock of what he didn’t know or feared. He studied the resulting graffiti, searching for a pattern that illuminated the answers to the five questions—who, what, where, when, and why. Before retreating to his desk chair, he circled Charles Rockley’s name and drew a solid line to nowhere, punctuating it with a question:
Who told Rockley about the tape?

Blues was right. If Rockley had only been employed at Galaxy for a year, he couldn’t have known about the taped conversation between Ed Fiori and Judge Carter unless someone else at Galaxy had told him. Double-checking his reasoning, he pulled up Rockley’s personnel records from the arbitration file and reviewed Rockley’s employment history, comparing it to his testimony at the hearing.

Rockley was thirty-eight years old. He graduated from Ohio University with a business degree and worked a series of middle-level management jobs in unrelated industries before being hired by Galaxy a year ago. He was divorced and had moved around a lot, no job lasting more than a few years. Galaxy hired him to be a shift supervisor for blackjack dealers, a position that required more middle-level management skills than it did an understanding of when to hit on thirteen.

Rockley’s résumé was that of a flat-liner, someone who had topped out early, substituting lateral moves for advancement. He was an invisible employee, never leaving a mark or a memory. Asked at the hearing why he’d moved from job to job, he answered that each new job was a better opportunity. It didn’t look that way to Mason, but it was an innocuous answer that Vince Bongiovanni, Carol Hill’s lawyer, didn’t challenge.

In her defense of Galaxy, Lari Prillman underscored something that was missing from Rockley’s employment history. He’d never been the subject of a complaint for sexual harassment. He was, at least on paper, a model—though decidedly undistinguished—employee.

Rockley’s deposition testimony read like the milquetoast image Mason gleaned from his personnel file. He gave polite, simple, and direct answers to the lawyers’ questions, refusing to take Bongiovanni’s bait and fight with the opposing lawyer. Mason could practically see him looking Lari Prillman squarely in the eye as he denied Carol Hill’s allegations with a carefully calibrated hint of outrage at her accusations.

All of which made Mason’s question—
Who told Rockley about the tape?—
all the more compelling. Rockley was the kind of guy who would never be in the loop on something so sensitive. There was nothing apparent in his past or present to explain why anyone at Galaxy would share with him the explosive information about Judge Carter or Mason.

Perhaps, Mason speculated, he’d stumbled onto it, realized its value, and decided to blackmail the judge to save his job. If so, Mason had grossly underestimated Rockley’s paper persona. Maybe Rockley was one of those guys who showed up at work one morning with an assault rifle and mowed down half a dozen coworkers before the cops shot him, leaving the survivors to scratch their heads and comment what a quiet guy he had always been.

Re-examining the dry erase board, Mason highlighted the names of Al Webb, the casino’s general manager, and Lila Collins, the HR director. Mason assumed that Webb was more likely than Collins to know about the taped conversations, but he relocated their names to the end of the line reaching from Rockley’s.

That was all Mason could do until he heard from Blues. He had no doubt that Rockley would talk to him. When Blues wanted information from someone, he rarely came up empty. The greater risk was what Rockley would do after Blues finished with him. Blues would motivate him to keep his mouth shut and make another career move, this one out of town. Mason was certain Rockley wouldn’t be missed at Galaxy.

If Rockley could point the way further up the food chain at Galaxy, Blues would make him draw a map. Mason would add that information to the dry erase board, knowing it was only a beginning. Rockley had to be the loose end of the thread, not the beginning.

He wasted ten minutes throwing darts at the target hanging on the wall across from his desk, arcing high lob shots, not paying attention to where the darts landed, just passing time. He had other cases to work on, but couldn’t muster his concentration. If the blackmail scheme blew up in his face, he’d be charged with corrupting a public official. He checked the Missouri Criminal Code. It was a Class C felony punishable by a sentence of up to five years in the state penitentiary. The statute of limitations hadn’t run.