Lou Mason Mystery - 02 - The Last Witness Read Free

street of rising and falling fortunes Kansas City wore like an asphalt ID bracelet. From the lip of the Missouri River on the north edge of downtown to the Country Club Plaza shopping district, forty-seven blocks south, Broadway was high-rise and low-rise, professionals and payday loans, insurance and uninsurable, homes and homeless, the Big Man and the Little Man elbowing each other for position.
    Mason wondered how Blues had been linked to Cullan’s murder. As far as he knew, they had never even met. Maybe something had happened between them when Blues was a cop, something that led to Cullan’s murder years later. Mason dismissed that as unlikely. Blues didn’t carry grudges for years. He settled them or expunged them.
    It was possible that Cullan had surfaced in one of the cases Blues had handled as a private investigator, as either a target or a client. Blues didn’t talk with Mason about his cases, unless he needed Mason’s help.
    Before he bought the bar, Blues taught piano at the Conservatory of Music. Cullan hadn’t seemed the type to take up music late in life, and teaching someone the difference between bass clef and treble clef wasn’t likely to drive Blues to murder. At his worst, Blues would tell a student to play the radio instead of the piano.
    Harry Ryman was right about one thing. Blues had his own system of justice and he didn’t hesitate to use violence to enforce it. For Blues, violence was a great equalizer, leveling the playing field against long odds. Few people would use it, even those who threatened it. The threat without follow-through was weak, a shortcoming Blues couldn’t abide. Blues wasn’t casual about violence, though. He wielded it with the precision and purpose of a surgeon using a scalpel.
    Blues and Harry were partners when Blues was a rookie cop and Harry was the veteran who was supposed to teach him about the street. Harry was by the book and Blues wrote his own book. Their partnership, and Blues’s career as a cop, ended six years earlier when Blues shot and killed a woman during a drug bust. Internal Affairs gave Blues the choice of quitting or being prosecuted. He quit.
    Harry had warned Mason against working with Blues, predicting that Blues would go down one day and that Harry would be there, waiting. Blues shrugged when Mason told him what Harry said, refusing to talk about the case that had fractured their relationship.
    Saying that Harry and Blues hated each other was too simple an explanation. Harry and Blues shared a wound neither man could heal. Whenever the three of them were together, Mason felt like he was on the bomb squad, trying to guess whether Blues or Harry would go off first.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    “Sergeant Peterson,” Mason said, reading the desk sergeant’s name tag, “I’m Lou Mason. Harry Ryman brought Wilson Bluestone in a few minutes ago. I’m Bluestone’s lawyer.”
    Peterson was reading USA Today . He looked at Mason over his half-glasses, sighed his resentment at Mason’s intrusion, dropped his paper, and picked up the phone.
    “He’s here,” he said and hung up, returning to his paper.
    A civilian police department employee materialized and escorted Mason to the second-floor detective squad room, pointing him to a hard-backed chair. The squad room reflected the uninspired use of public money—pale walls, faded vanilla tile, and banged-up steel desks covered with the antiseptic details of destroyed lives.
    Mason waited while the crosscurrents of cops and their cases flowed around him. He’d been here before, waiting to be questioned and accused. An ambivalent mix of urgency and resignation permeated the place. Cops had a special sweat, born of the need to preserve and protect and the fearful realization that they were too often outnumbered. That sweat was strongest in homicide.
    Homicide cops took the darkest confessions of the cruelest impulses. They sweet-talked, cajoled, and deceived the guilty into speaking the unspeakable. The more