Текст книги "A Criminal Defense: A Harlan Donnally Novel"

Автор книги: Steven Gore

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter 36

Here’s an overview of Mark’s calendar for the last six months,” Jackson said, as she walked into his office. She laid it on the blotter in front of Donnally, then leaned over, turned the pages, and ran her finger down each one. “You can see by the blank weeks when he was in Asia.”

Galen had left to meet with a longtime client in the jail to help him choose a new lawyer. He and Donnally had decided Galen’s cover story for resigning would be that he had a life-threatening medical problem that he had disclosed in private to Presiding Judge Ray McMullin. Donnally had called Goldhagen and gotten her consent, and then McMullin agreed to ask the judges hearing Galen’s cases to allow a new lawyer to substitute in. Donnally had no doubt that Galen’s pale face and uncharacteristic agitation would convince everyone in the court system the illness was real.

“Mark never talked about it,” Jackson said. “But I checked once or twice, and his trips coincided with gymnastic competitions in Thailand and Vietnam. They’re kind of a big deal over there. National pride involved. Got a lot of press coverage because the program was a ticket out of poverty for lots of village kids. There are even some videos on the Internet.”

“How come he was so secretive?” Donnally asked.

Donnally felt Jackson’s breast rub against his shoulder. He leaned to his right to break the contact. She bent down a little further and made contact again.

“I have no idea.”

He thought back to what Navarro had told him about her background and her sexually abusive father and the kinds of things Janie had told him over the years about the abused women she’d treated. He suspected fear and panic about what he might discover about Hamlin and her had led her to revert to the use of a teenage weapon of self-defense: Buy off Daddy with sex. He also wondered whether she’d run that routine on Hamlin and whether he’d exploited it. He imagined her standing in Hamlin’s shower on a morning after, cursing herself for sleeping with him and bewildered about why she’d done it.

But this wasn’t the time to confront her about the facts of her current behavior or to try to test his speculations about her relationship with Hamlin.

Donnally rolled back his chair and stood. Jackson straightened up and put on her most suggestive Tina Turner face. He could feel the sexual tension coming from her and sensed her filtering everything he was saying and doing, and measuring it against her subconscious intent. And the fact that her eyes displayed a certain kind of vacancy, a vacuum of unthinking, told him it was motivated in a way she didn’t herself understand.

But it was real. Blood-and-flesh real.

“How about gathering together all you can on what Mark was doing over there.”

He suspected she already had some of the answers he was looking for, but he needed to use his question as a way to force them both beyond what could’ve become an impasse.

Jackson nodded and her shoulders settled. He felt the connection break and her emotionally backing away.

She licked her lips and her brows furrowed as though she’d just become aware of her desire and was wondering why it arose just then.

He decided to push her past the awkwardness of the moment.

“See if you can find out who else was involved,” Donnally said. “Where they’re located over there. How he paid for it. Anything else on the Internet.”

She nodded again, then turned and headed to her desk. He watched her and recognized by the slight wobble in her step that she knew he was watching her. It was like she was aware that she was being captured on film for the first time and felt her everyday gestures turn into self-conscious performances.

Donnally waited until she passed out of his view, then sat down and scanned the calendar. Even if Hamlin’s work in Asia was a kind of charity, that didn’t mean the money funding it was clean. Using dirty money to do good and to buy legitimacy was the San Francisco way. All the tong and triad leaders made a show of contributing to the benevolent societies and funding the Chinese New Year parade, the Italian gangsters shoveled money to the churches, even the Hell’s Angels bought turkeys for the poor at Thanksgiving and ran toy drives for Christmas.

Thinking of the cash in the safe and in Hamlin’s bedroom hiding place, Donnally wondered whether Hamlin was engaged in transferring the money to someone in the old country on behalf of the man with the Vietnamese accent who’d held a gun at Donnally’s back.

Donnally resisted the temptation to reduce the coincidence of the Vietnamese gunman’s intervention and Galen’s disclosure of Hamlin’s Southeast Asian charity into effect and cause or even into links in a chain.

He also realized he had another temptation to resist.

No one had mentioned women in Hamlin’s life. No wife or ex-wife. No girlfriend or ex-girlfriend. No boyfriend or ex-boyfriend.

Maybe the charity was a pretext for sex tourism, for hitting the brothels of Bangkok and Hanoi. Maybe Hamlin had a girlfriend over there. Maybe—he felt a shudder of disgust pass through him—maybe the half-naked kids who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of his charity were actually his targets.

Chapter 37

Money.

More and more Donnally was convinced the route to whoever killed Mark Hamlin would follow a money trail—

And he hated money trail cases.

As a cop, he hadn’t lied to himself. He knew he didn’t have the talent, he didn’t have the mind for it. He couldn’t see patterns in numbers and abstract the character of human actions from deposits and withdrawals and balance sheets.

He had a hard time just keeping track of the pluses and minuses of his café’s money flow.

And now he found himself sitting at Hamlin’s conference table surveying stacks of bank statements. Eight bank accounts, personal and business. All with connected ATM or credit cards.

Donnally felt straitjacketed. Paralyzed. Hamlin could’ve laundered money just by moving it among these accounts and Donnally knew he wouldn’t be able to figure it out.

Sensing motion in the doorway, he looked up to see Jackson walking in. She’d undone the top two buttons of her blouse. He felt a surge of annoyance. He wasn’t in the mood for the manipulation. He was interested in the truth she was in a position to expose, not the cleavage she was intending to reveal.

Jackson stopped at the opposite side of the table, leaned over at the waist, and tapped one of the piles of bank statements with her fingernail. “There’s an easier way to get the answers you’re looking for.”

Donnally fixed his eyes on hers, resisting the temptation to let his gaze fall where she wanted it to. Her maneuver made him recall a female suspect who’d cozied up next to him in the bar where he’d sought her out, and had asked, “Is there any physical way we can resolve this?”

“How do you figure?” Donnally asked.

“We have a sophisticated accounting program, not your in-a-box, buy-it-off-the-shelf kind. We bought it to make it easy to export the financial data to Mark’s accountant so he could calculate his quarterly tax payments and prepare his returns.”

“How complicated is it?”

“Not too. I can show you how to search it and to create reports.”

Donnally wished Janie was around to sit Jackson down and take her back to the critical moments in her childhood and then return her to the present so she could understand what she was doing.

As he looked at her, he wondered whether her behavior was just an expression of grief and dislocation after the loss of a father figure, for Hamlin might have been the most important person in her life.

At the same time, maybe she’d begun to fear Hamlin, as she feared her own molesting father, even before Hamlin’s death, perhaps as though he was her own Peoples Temple Jim Jones.

“Maybe you can give me the manual to look at,” Donnally said.

Jackson straightened up, but lowered her gaze, her lips pursed into a little girl’s pout. She folded her arms below her breasts, forcing them up into the opening in her blouse, her skin reflecting the fluorescent light shining from above.

Donnally thought he had better give her some encouragement until he could figure out how to deal with her.

“After I get familiar with the program, maybe you can show me some of its tricks.”

Jackson smiled and headed back toward her desk, nearly on her toes, almost like she was skipping.

Donnally followed her and waited while she located the manual on her bookcase. He turned away after she handed it to him, but before she could offer any more help, and then took it into Hamlin’s office.

But it was hard to concentrate.

He felt like Jackson was looking over his shoulder, breathing against his ear and neck. It made him feel like she’d won a round, gotten into his head, but he wasn’t going to show it.

He found the application icon on the screen and activated the program—

And she won another round.

Jackson knew he’d need to come to her to get the password.

In order not to have to do it in person, he called her on the intercom. She insisted on coming into the office to give it to him.

Donnally rose and stood by the wall behind the desk. She slipped by him, leaned over, entered the password, and then clicked a box on the screen to make it visible: “showmethemoney.”

He didn’t need to write it down.

Jackson straightened, gave him a we’ve-got-a-secret smile, and then returned to her desk. He wasn’t sure whether the secret was the password itself or the fact that the phrase “show me the money” was at least a subliminal confession on Hamlin’s part that he’d left the greater good behind him in his race to the bank.

Or maybe the word Donnally wanted was subconscious, not subliminal, a manifestation of a professional schizophrenia.

Except that Hamlin had to have been aware of his metamorphosis from a soldier of justice into a soldier of fortune. For, eventually, even for people like Hamlin, the self-justifications have to run out.

Chapter 38

Donnally closed the office door and then sat down and called Janie. He described what he called Jackson’s “symptoms.”

“I’m thinking it’s some kind of defense mechanism,” Donnally said. “Like she’s acting out.”

Janie laughed. “Who appointed you shrink for a day? A defense mechanism, Dr. Freud?”

He knew she’d caught him. He’d felt a little awkward saying the words, like he’d been paddling into her professional pond on a makeshift raft.

“You have a better idea?”

“Transference.”

“You mean like she and Hamlin were sexually involved and she’s switched to me?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she had some kind of psychological dependence on him, like a father figure.”

“I guessed at that one. At least give me a gold star for that.”

“Let’s make it a cigar, it’s more Freudian. That kind of thing happens all the time between patients and their therapists. The therapist becomes a substitute for the parent or for the abusive boyfriend and the feelings get redirected from one to the other, or from the past to the present.”

“What do you make of her acting like a sexualized little girl? Who am I supposed to be in that fantasy?”

“I wouldn’t make too much of the sexual part. It’s a weapon of the weak.” Janie paused for a moment, then said, “If you can understand the nature of the transference, what she’s trying to communicate, you’ll better understand her relationship with Hamlin.”

“And whether she’s now trying to protect him or herself?”

“Very good, Sigmund. Insights like that will make you famous someday—got to go. I have some paid shrinking to do.”

Donnally hung up, realizing that he had now crossed borders into two territories he wasn’t good at. Finance and psychology.

After gazing at the door and imagining Jackson on the other side, he decided numbers were more manageable and looked again at the monitor. He spotted a command button titled “Reports” and clicked on it. The drop-down list showed one named “Current Year–Combined.” He accessed it and discovered Hamlin didn’t have much in the way of fortune, at least in his bank accounts. The bottom-line figures for money in and money out were almost equal. Unless he owned his duplex free and clear or had investments or a retirement account, most of his assets were composed of the cash Donnally had discovered.

He opened a browser and checked San Francisco County Recorder’s and Assessor’s Office records. They showed that Hamlin had paid off the duplex he lived in six months earlier and then had transferred it into the Mark Hamlin irrevocable trust. He knew from his parents’ tax planning that making a trust irrevocable meant it couldn’t be changed without the beneficiary’s permission. Hamlin had thereby given up all control over the assets in the trust to the beneficiary. But the answer to the question of who that was didn’t show up in the online records.

Donnally wondered whether Hamlin had made the trust irrevocable because he didn’t trust himself, maybe because of his opium problem.

He checked his watch. There was enough time to make it to City Hall before it closed to try to find out who Hamlin did trust.

Later, after he’d discovered who killed Hamlin, he figured he’d also discover whether that trust was well-placed.

If his guess about the value of Hamlin’s duplex was anywhere close, whoever the beneficiary was had cleared an easy couple of million dollars the instant Hamlin’s heart seized up.

Chapter 39

When Donnally stepped out of the elevator and into the marble-floored lobby, he spotted Navarro coming in through the double front doors.

Donnally flashed a palm, holding him in place, as he approached.

“What do you have?” Donnally asked, looking down at the four-inch-thick accordion file in Navarro’s hand.

“More phone records.”

“How about walk with me over to City Hall?” Donnally pointed at the clock above the elevator doors. It showed 4:40. “I need to check something quick.”

Navarro nodded and followed Donnally out.

Donnally glanced down at the file. “Anything interesting?”

“A problem Judge McMullin may have to resolve. After getting court orders for the subscriber information for all of the phones Hamlin called and the ones that called him for the last month, I started to flowchart the calls. But I had to stop.”

“Because they were telling you too much?”

“Exactly. I may be drifting into attorney-client areas.”

They turned down Larkin Street and could see the grassy east end of Civic Center Plaza and the west end of the farmers’ market.

“Give me an example,” Donnally said.

“Calls with Reggie Hancock.”

Donnally’s stomach tensed and his fist clenched, even though he wasn’t surprised there might have been phone traffic between Hamlin and Hancock. It was the mere thought of Hancock.

Reginald Leotis Hancock had started out as LA’s Mark Hamlin in the seventies, drifted into handling big drug cases in the eighties, and then into high-profile homicide cases at the end of the nineties. Some of those he was hired on to from the start. Others he injected himself into. Countless times he’d worked his way from the sidewalk where he commented on cases for cable news networks to a spot behind the defense table. His audience, when he was speaking into the mikes, wasn’t the long distance voyeurs sitting in their living rooms, but defendants sitting in their nearby cells, desperate for a defense strategy that might win for them.

“Calls between guys like that wouldn’t be unexpected,” Donnally said. “I’m sure they worked together on north-south cases. And I’m not sure the fact of the calls themselves can tell you what the content was.”

“It’s the surrounding calls,” Navarro said, holding up the accordion folder like he was showing off evidence. “Hamlin calls Hancock, then calls the DEA, then calls the U.S. Attorney, then calls a cell number belonging to an old-time drug trafficker named Hector Camacho, and then calls Hancock back.”

Donnally stopped and turned toward Navarro. “How’d you know it was Camacho? Those guys don’t have phones in their own names.”

Navarro swallowed before answering. “I . . . uh . . . checked with our intelligence unit.”

The move reminded Donnally of Navarro’s preemptive search of Hamlin’s apartment.

Donnally let it go. Jamming him wouldn’t change what he’d done, and his face showed he knew he’d done wrong.

“You think Hamlin was planning on surrendering Camacho on a still secret indictment?”

“I don’t think that’s it. More likely Camacho is trying to cut a deal to roll on somebody. That had to have been the reason the DEA was in the loop. Hancock represented Camacho in the late 1980s in LA. He pled out and did seventeen years in the federal pen.”

“That was a big sentence back then.”

“And he was a big guy, and tough, too. He left a few murders in his wake the local DA couldn’t prove, so the U.S. Attorney hit him as hard as he could. And my guess is that Camacho is not up for doing another seventeen.”

“How old is Camacho?”

“Early sixties. Given life expectancy in the joint, another seventeen years would be a death sentence.”

“He’s back in the trade?”

“Intelligence says he’s moving a hundred kilos of cocaine a month. That puts him at the top of the federal sentencing guidelines.”

Donnally pointed ahead to indicate he still needed to get to City Hall, and they walked on.

“I think there are two ways to look at it,” Donnally said. “It isn’t all that privileged if the DEA and the U.S. Attorney are in on it. And if the telephone company can look at the phone records, they’re not all that confidential.” He looked over at Navarro. “Except they wouldn’t know that Camacho was using that particular phone.”

Navarro cleared his throat. “Sorry about that one. My finger is always close to the trigger.”

Donnally reached out his hand for the file. “How about I take it from here?”

Navarro passed it over.

“I’ll call this one a no harm, no foul,” Donnally said. “I don’t think it will go anywhere. If somebody was going to get hit, it would’ve been Camacho, not Hamlin. He’s the snitch, he did the damage, or is going to, so he’s the dangerous one.”

Chapter 40

He didn’t ask me if I wanted to inherit his duplex,” Lemmie Hamlin told Donnally, sitting across the table in her kitchen an hour and a half later. “He just did it.”

Lemmie pointed through her atrium window toward Golden Gate Park and beyond it at the sun flaming out in the Pacific Ocean. It was what the real estate brokers called a million-dollar view, but this one was out of a multimillion-dollar town house.

“It’s not like I need the money.”

“Wanting and needing are different things.”

Her brows furrowed. “Did you ever read any of my books?”

Donnally smiled. “You mean, all the way through?”

Lemmie nodded.

He shook his head.

“Then you’ll have to trust me on this one. I know the difference.” Lemmie’s face seemed to wince, then she said, “I guess you could say that I’m compelled to write, not to hunt and gather and acquire money. And I can write what I want, because people buy whatever I put on the page. I don’t have to write for the market, or try to time it.”

“No compromises.”

Lemmie nodded again. “I know it’s a luxury others don’t have.”

Donnally took a sip of the coffee Lemmie had poured for him.

“Then why did he impose his duplex on you?”

“Maybe guilt. Maybe to make me a coconspirator in his compromises.”

“I’m starting to think his problem was far worse than mere compromising.”

“You’re probably right. I’m not even sure he could’ve articulated what position he was compromising from. And I’m not sure any of the people he worked with, and who acted like he acted, could either.”

“Like Reggie Hancock?”

Lemmie drew back. “Why do you mention Reggie?”

Donnally was surprised by her reaction. “Why, why?”

“Mark once set us up on a date. Reggie made my skin crawl. He’s beyond arrogant. He has no values at all, believes in nothing. He bragged about things other people would be embarrassed even to admit.”

Lemmie glanced toward her laptop on a table in the corner, overlooking her garden. Her writing desk.

“He’s a character in my new book, except I made him a medical researcher who falsifies his clinical trial test results instead of a lawyer and I made him East Indian instead of black. He figures that since thirty percent of people have a placebo effect anyway, he can claim a thirty percent success rate. For some drugs on the market that’s not so bad. Where he goes wrong—where he deceives himself—is that it’s a cancer drug he’s developing. There is no placebo effect on cancer, and people will die.”

“Did Reggie ask you out again?”

“Yeah, when he came into town to meet with Mark or appear in court up here. And I went. For research.”

Lemmie leaned back in her chair. She closed her eyes and took in a long breath and then exhaled as though steeling herself for an assault of memory.

“Reggie was a petri dish of corruption.” She opened her eyes again. “I watched it grow over the years like a virus that escapes from the lab and infects others.”

“Like Mark?”

“Like Mark. He turned my brother’s rebellion against my father from a fight for justice into a kind of nihilism. Into a justification for substituting his own judgment for the law’s. It’s like . . . like . . .” She winced again. “Shoot. I can’t think of the word. It’s when a jury sets aside the law.”

“Nullification.”

“That’s it. Nullification. The jury finds someone not guilty who everybody knows is guilty because they think the law is bad or the defendant’s motives were good, or at least not evil. The problem was that for Reggie his aim became nullification in every case and by any means necessary.”

“Except it wasn’t in the interest of some notion of justice.”

“At the beginning, it may have been. At the end, no. I think Reggie was opposed to drug laws on principle. He felt virtuous fighting those kinds of cases, and he was good at it, and got rich doing them.”

Donnally watched the sides of her mouth turn up as a thought came to her.

“I guess you could say virtue is easy when there’s money to be made, then it somehow transforms into the virtue of easy money.”

Donnally smiled. “You should write that down and use it in a book.”

“I did.” Lemmie smiled back. “That’s what you get for not reading my novels all the way through. It’s a continuing theme.”

“And you got on that road because of people like Reggie?”

Lemmie’s smile faded. “No, my father. None of the people he persecuted were guilty of anything, they simply refused to snitch on people like themselves who did nothing but exercise their constitutional rights. For my father, the law was merely an instrument, sometimes a scalpel, sometimes a hammer, sometimes an ax.”

“And you think Reggie had a role in leading your brother down that same path.”

She shrugged. “Maybe it was Mark running to catch up. I’m not saying Mark wasn’t ambitious all on his own, didn’t want the money and the notoriety. He did. It’s just that how he chose to do it changed. And that was his own responsibility. He couldn’t blame that on our father or Reggie.”

Lemmie gazed toward the window as though the view would provide some kind of mental escape, but night had fallen and the glass mirrored the inside of the kitchen. Donnally watched her eyes settle on a spot, his reflection, but he wasn’t sure she was actually seeing him.

Finally, she looked over and asked, “How did Reggie’s name happen to come up now?”

“He and Mark were trading lots of calls during the last month. I checked previous years and it seems to be part of a pattern. One month a year. Lots of calls.”

“Maybe they went on vacations together.”

The words came out of her mouth fast, then she reddened as though she’d opened a door to something obscene, or set him up to open it. And he did.

“Like little jaunts to Southeast Asia to look at muscled kids?”

Lemmie clenched her fists on the table. “I don’t know what they did over there. Anyway, it was something Reggie got him involved with.”

Donnally reached down to the floor and picked up a manila envelope containing printouts about Hamlin and his alleged charity that Jackson had left for him at the office. He opened it and slid the contents onto the table.

Lemmie reached for a photo showing her brother receiving an award from the Southeast Asia Youth Gymnastics Association. Hamlin looked awkward, uncomfortable, standing in a row of middle-aged Asian and Australian men under the stage lights.

“You ever work the prostitution detail?” Lemmie asked, as she stared at the pages. “Especially ones that targeted child predators.”

“Only as part of the arrest team.”

She pointed at the man standing to the right of her brother. A heavy-set Thai, with his belt drawn tight across his stomach, just below his rib cage, Humpty Dumpty–like, sweat glistening on his forehead and darkening his dress shirt collar.

“Look at the eyes on this guy,” Lemmie said. “Look at the eyes on all of them. I’ve gone down to the Tenderloin, watched men cruising, looking for teenage boys and girls. They’re the same eyes these guys have. Somehow both dead and calculating.”

“But not on your brother.”

“He just looks embarrassed.”

Donnally spread the papers on the table. Some of them showed other photos from the same association meeting.

“I don’t see Reggie in any of these,” Donnally said.

“As I said, I don’t know what they did over there.”

Other photographs showed teenagers posing in tiny outfits. The thin girls encased in spandex and the boys with arms and leg muscles like bodybuilders, so lean and defined they looked like they’d been skinned.

Donnally looked again at Hamlin standing with the certificate in his hands.

“You think this was a pretext to travel over there to buy opium?” Donnally asked.

“It would be a weird one and wouldn’t make a very good cover story. Everybody who knows he made regular trips over there would think—or at least entertain the idea—he was a child molester.” She glanced up at Donnally. “Just like you do.”

Lemmie slid the photos back, saying, “Another weird thing. Reggie and Mark used to smoke pot together and drink Black Label and sing along with that old Creedence Clearwater song ‘Proud Mary.’ ” Crank it up and pound the table. And we’re rollin’ ”—she tapped the tabletop in time with the tune—“rollin’ on the ri-ver.”

Donnally was just a child when the song came out. When he was growing up all the kids assumed that “Proud Mary” was code for marijuana and “rolling” meant rolling joints. Grown men like Hancock and Hamlin getting high and singing it just seemed childish.

But sitting there listening to Lemmie he realized there was something sophomoric about everything Hamlin did, absolutely everything, maybe even fatally so.