Lou Mason Mystery - 02 - The Last Witness by Joel Goldman

surprised him with tickets to Grand Cayman, a second honeymoon before they’d finished paying for the first one. They danced as if they were possessed, shouted and laughed with strangers, and marveled at the magic in their lives. Minutes before midnight, Kate led him onto an empty beach glowing with the reflection of the moon and stars, where they had made love as the New Year dawned.
    Three years later, she left him, telling him she had run out of love for him. It was a concept he couldn’t understand. Love wasn’t like oil, he told her. You don’t wait for the well to run dry and start digging someplace else. Unless you were Kate.
    Since then, Mason had done his share of digging, though his relationships had proved too shallow or fragile to last. He was glad to use work as an excuse to skip New Year’s Eve and the annual audit of his personal account.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
     
    Mason capped his evening with another ten-thousand-meter row across his dining room, his strokes rough, his timing off. Blues’s case had the same effect, both making him sweat.
    His punctuated his ragged breathing with deep grunts each time he hauled the rowing handle deep into his belly. Tuffy, not liking what she saw, paced back and forth, ears up and tail down. He finished as the doorbell rang, mopping his face and neck with a towel as he staggered to his feet.
    His house was fifty years old. The front door was a massive arched slab of dark mahogany set into an entry vestibule with a limestone floor. When he opened it, a woman was standing on the stoop, head down and her arms bundled around her. He didn’t recognize her until she raised her chin. It was Beth Harrell.
    He’d last seen her at a bar association lunch or law school alumni dinner—he couldn’t remember which, only that it was a couple of years ago. Sophisticated, beautiful, and playful, she was also the smartest person in the room, a combination that drew people to her. In law school, everyone wanted to take her class, the guys so they could drool and the girls so they could learn how to be more like her, traits that made her and Billy Sunshine soul mates.
    As she stood in his doorway, bowed by the winter wind, something was missing. The certainty that the world was hers had vanished. Her eyes flickered and her lips were pressed in a tight half smile.
    “Beth?” She nodded. “Come on in before we both freeze to death.”
    Mason closed the door as she pulled off her gloves, rubbing her hands along her arms and then pressing them against her face to warm her frozen cheeks. Her body shook with a final shiver.
    “Thanks. I don’t remember when it’s been so cold.”
    She unzipped her coat. Tuffy trotted to her side, sniffed her, and planted her front paws on Beth’s stomach. Beth stroked the back of her head. Satisfied, Tuffy dropped her paws, circled behind Mason and lay down.
    “My dog is shameless and will give herself to anyone who scratches her behind her ears.”
    “Love and loyalty should be so easy to come by.”
    Mason knew that the only reason Beth Harrell would come knocking at nine o’clock on a Friday night cold enough to freeze her face off was to talk about Jack Cullan and Blues. Figuring that she chose the time and place so that no one would know, he decided to let her get around to Cullan’s murder in her own time.
    “Can I get you something to drink?”
    “That would be great. Something hot would do the trick.”
    Mason led her to the kitchen. Tuffy figured out where they were going and raced there ahead of them.
    “I’ve got tea. Never developed a taste for coffee, so I don’t keep it in the house.”
    “Tea would be good, perfect.”
    Mason boiled a cup of water in the microwave, and a few minutes later they were seated at his kitchen table. Beth stirred her tea, pressing the tea bag against the side of the cup. Mason drank from a long-necked bottle of beer and pressed the cool glass against his neck.
    “I read about you in the paper last