Читать онлайн «Motion to Kill»

Joel Goldman

Motion to Kill

CHAPTER ONE

A dead partner is bad for business, even if he dies in his sleep. But when he washes ashore on one side of a lake and his boat is found abandoned on the other side, it’s worse. When the sheriff tells the coroner to “cut him open and see what we’ve got,” it’s time to dust off the resume. And the ink was barely dry on Lou Mason’s.

The time was seven thirty on Sunday morning, July 12. It was too early for dead bodies, too humid for the smell, and just right for the flies and mosquitoes. And it was rotten for identifying the body of a dead partner. These were the moments to remember.

Mason’s dead partner was Richard Sullivan, senior partner in Sullivan amp; Christenson, his law firm for the last three months. Sullivan was the firm’s rainmaker. He was a sawed-off, in-your-face, thump-your-chest ballbuster. His clients and partners loved the money he made for them, but none of them ever confessed to liking him. Though in his late fifties, he had one of those perpetually mid forties faces. Except that now he was dead, as gray as a Minneapolis winter and bloated from a night in the water.

Sullivan amp; Christenson was a Kansas City law firm that employed forty lawyers to merge and acquire clients’ assets so they could protect them from taxation before and after death. When bare-knuckled bargaining didn’t get the deal done, they’d sue the bastards. Or defend the firm’s bastard if he was sued first. Mason’s job was to win regardless of which bastard won the race to the courthouse.

The U. S. attorney, Franklin St.

John, had been preparing a special invitation to the courthouse for Sullivan’s biggest client, a banker named Victor O’Malley. The RSVP would be sent to the grand jury that had been investigating O’Malley for two years. Sullivan asked Mason to defend O’Malley the day Mason joined the firm as its twelfth partner. Mason accepted and Sullivan spoon-fed him the details of O’Malley’s complex business deals.

Mason figured out that O’Malley had stolen a lot of money from the bank he owned. He was having a harder time figuring out how to defend him. Fifty million dollars was a lot to blame on a bookkeeping mistake.

Two days earlier, Sullivan took Mason to lunch and, over a couple of grilled chicken Caesar salads, casually inquired what would happen to O’Malley’s defense if certain documents disappeared.

“Which documents?” Mason asked.

Sullivan studied Mason for a moment before answering. “Let’s assume that there are records that show O’Malley and one of his business associates received favorable treatment from his bank. ”

Mason didn’t hesitate. “That’s what the whole case is about. There are too many of those documents to lose even if I didn’t mind going to jail with O’Malley. Which I do. ”

“Lou, I only care about the documents with my name on them. Do you understand?”

Mason nodded slowly, wiping his hands with a white cloth napkin more than was needed to clean them.

“I’m not going to jail for you either. Show me the documents, and we’ll figure something out. ”